03-10-2020, 12:20 AM
(02-10-2020, 11:55 PM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(02-10-2020, 09:01 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As for the connection to the Czech orthographical reform of the same time period, I would rather say, at most, that the VM could have been inspired by the same general social atmosphere in the region that inspired the tumultuous period of Jan Hus's life and the aftermath of his execution in Bohemia in the early 15th century. The Hussite Wars were one of the greatest and most significant social upheavals in all of late medieval Europe. The new orthography was related to demands for ecclesiastical reform and greater popular access to religious and other literature written in the spoken vernacular language of the people rather than in Latin. This went hand in hand with demands for reforms reducing the power of the church hierarchy and the clergy.Thanks for that historical background, Geoffrey. It sounds like a similar reason for most spelling reforms I've heard of — a way to raise literacy levels and reduce errors and misunderstandings in written communication.
I brought this up when you were building your Judeo-Greek theory, but I'm reminded again of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. My understanding of the Arabic writing system is that it's written like cursive Roman letters are supposed to be written: you draw one continuous line for a word, and then add in dots and other marks. There are a number of consonants in Arabic that are distinguished only by dots or lack thereof. Apparently someone who reads a lot of Arabic can read a text that contains only the lines, not the dots, and can guess based on context which consonants are intended.
Was, or is, diacritic-free Czech a similar tradition, that's well historically attested over a long period of time? I guess what I'm asking is, was there a long time period between native Czech speakers beginning to write to each other in their native language (instead of Latin), and folks like Jan Hus realizing that extant attempts to write Czech with the Roman alphabet were too ambiguous for effective communication? The Greeks and Italians both eliminated most of their diacritics in 20th century language standardizations and spelling reforms, which were no longer needed for written comprehension. Could the Czechs do, or have done, something similar, with no ill effects?
These are interesting comparisons, so I want to clarify what they do and don't have in common, to the best of my knowledge. Before the 15th century, Czech wasn't written in a particularly ambiguous way, it was just written with a lot of awkward Latin digraphs and trigraphs to represent single sounds. Now this could become ambiguous or confusing if people mixed up or couldn't understand which digraph/trigraph represented which sound.
Dotless Arabic is interesting in its own right, but it is FAR more ambiguous than Czech without the diacritical marks! In Arabic, not only /t/ and /th/ but also even /b/ would appear identical without the dots! Likewise for /r/ and /z/. Dotless Arabic was a fair comparison to the ambiguity of my Judeo-Greek theory. Czech without diacritical marks, and my Slavic VCI interpretation, are far, far less ambiguous.
It would be interesting to examine examples of the 17th century Czech documents that Rene mentions, to see how ambiguous those writings were if they did not indicate diacritical marks two centuries after the marks were introduced into Czech orthography.
It would not be a good idea to eliminate diacritical marks from standard written Czech today! Czech with the diacritical marks remains one of the most phonemically precise and accurate writing systems in the world. The marks do not represent archaic distinctions that are no longer needed for comprehension -- they are far more significant than French é/ê/è, etc., for example. It's simply interesting that it is possible for Czechs to communicate and comprehend each other without the diacritics, despite the ambiguity that this omission indeed creates.
