De orthographia bohemica () is a Latin work published between 1406 and 1412. It is attributed to Charles University rector and reformer Jan Hus. The book codified the Czech language's modern spelling and orthography and had decisive impact on the orthography of a number of other European languages.
Orthographia bohemica was the first known document in which spelling reforms were suggested for a Slavic language. It introduced, among other reforms, the diacritic signs ´ and ˇ which are now besides Czech used in the Baltic languages Lithuanian and Latvian, in other Slavic languages like Croatian, Slovak, Slovenian and partly Polish, and in several other European languages.
Provenance
Literacy in native languages became also one of the chief projects for the Czech Reformation including the first Hussites but especially for their later Unity of the Brethren branch with their bishop Comenius. While the author's identity and the precise date of authorship are unknown, it is widely held that the author is Jan Hus and the year of creation somewhere between 1406 and 1412, based on historical and philological studies.
Contents
The primary purpose of De orthographia bohemica was to simplify and unify Czech orthography in order to promote literacy by making the language "clearer and easier" to read and write. Instead of representing sounds using digraphs and trigraphs, it proposed a "diacritic orthography", where one letter indicates only one sound, and different but related sounds (such as those now represented by r and ř) are distinguished by diacritics. Briefly, one can summarize the spelling changes in Orthographia Bohemica as follows: The basic letters of the Latin alphabet (as well as the Latin digraph ch) were to be used for writing Czech, with sound values according to the conventions of medieval Latin pronunciation in Bohemia at the time. The only difference was that the letter c was always to be used to represent the sound , and never for . d represented /d/ as in Latin, and the letter g before e and i represented ; in other cases g represented .
Czech consonants that Latin did not possess would be represented by a Latin letter adorned with a diacritic dot. In particular, as Czech additionally possessed palatalized consonants and a hard l, the dot indicated softness above n, d, t, c and z, and hardness for l. Long vowels (which Latin possessed but did not indicate) were to be indicated by the čárka (an acute accent) above a, e, i and y.
To illustrate the simple and revolutionary nature of this spelling, take as an example the various ways of representing ř, compared with that seen in the grammar of Jan Gebauer. In manuscripts written before Hus, all of the following representations were in use: , , , , , , , and . Long vowels were written either with no indication of the length, or written double (sometimes with the second letter written in superscript), or with any of a wide and unstandardized range of diacritical marks. One could not even assume that the same scribe would consistently use their own conventions, and their use often varied even within a single manuscript.
Significance and impact
Orthographia bohemica was the first known document in which such spelling reforms were suggested for a Slavic language. It is not yet fully clear where Jan Hus drew inspiration for this work. Considered in the context of the contemporaneous study of letters of St. Jerome by Danish scholars of Hebrew working at the Sorbonne, there was a good knowledge of such orthographic practices at the time (particularly the designation of long vowels). According to a study by F. V. Mareš, a stimulus for the project was the author's knowledge of Glagolitic, used by Croatian monks in the Emmaus Monastery (Na Slovanech) in Prague.
The significance of the document lies in the longevity and wide application of its logical system of diacritics. Its impact is apparent in the , the first grammar of the Czech language, published in 1533, but the adoption of the new rules was relatively slow and far from uniform. Throughout the 16th century, some printers and typesetters ignored the prescriptions of Orthographia bohemica and continued to maintain some digraphs (e.g. ss for instead of š), although their use became considerably more uniform. In addition, scribes adopted the new rules much more slowly than book printers.