Legenda o Jidášovi, ll.

1-39
Linguistic commentary

Translation

The snake, driven to fury,

Set upon the man with much hissing.
Unable to do anything to him, however,
He bit his children instead.

The father cried, the mother wept,

See, everyone, how fickle
Are the earthly honour and praise,
How short-lived was the hope
For the Skariot land.

Let us notice with respect to our kingdom,

What has happened now [nenie] in Bohemia,
How there are no related kings
Of King Premysl’s descent,
And how his son and his grandson
Did not live long in this world.
The latter was still a child,
Growing brave and generous [Starting out bravely and generously; the meaning being that he
had an auspicious start in life]
And caring for his people,
Yet he could not long enjoy make use of these privileges [privileges, because he was born
into a royal lineage and these qualities were his by virtue of his birth]
For he was to pass away in his youth.
Even though he let everyone be at their will,
Still his innocent blood was shed.
It is always because of you, you treacherous people,
That many a land is laid to waste.
And I know that you, treachery, will not forget anything,
Yet you will yourself perish.

I too can speak, Judas!

People from the whole world know
How he made preparations from afar How Judas prepared his deed from a distance
While striving for worse and worse still,
To his eternal perdition.
He crossed the sea, the land and the rivers,
He went to Jerusalem, and thereafter
To the same land where Herod was deprived of his honour
And where the authority of Pilate was established,
Who ruled over that land and its environs,
And ruled freely over the Jews
Enjoying the power of strong support.
Orthography:

The excerpt attests to a consistent spelling system of the older type, which distinguished the
alveolar and the palatal sibilants and affricates. The following graphemes, diagraphs and
triagraphs are used:

/s/ - zz 10 wlazzty, z 26 zama sibilant, alveolar

/š/ - ſſ 22 wſſaks, ſ 16 geſchze, s 35 Herodes sibilant, palatal
/z/ - z 25 zemie sibilant, alveolar
/ž/ - s 39 sidowztwem sibilant, palatal
/c/ - cz 39 pomoczi affricate, alveolar
/č/ - chz 7 chzezt affricate, palatal

It is diagraphic spelling otherwise. This is often referred to as a diagraphic spelling of an

earlier type (early 14th century), where we find graphemic spelling for the affricates,
fricatives, and sibilants of the kind I outlined above. When we get to a later period the
diagraphic spelling becomes more inconsistent, the main reason being that we have a great
proliferation of writing – more people writing in Czech inevitably leads to much greater
variety and inconsistency. The very early 14th century texts come from a handful of people,
based in monasteries and chanceries. There were very few centres of writing. The
manuscripts differ from each other in specific orthographic realisations, but they tend to be
internally consistent, partly because of the specific training that people (scribes) received.

The question of norms becomes particularly pertinent when you get to printing – printing
shops were a lot more conscious of other people’s norms and norms could be more easily
promulgated thanks to reading.

When compared with Poland, there was an earlier vernacular tradition in Bohemia –
especially for religious reasons, but also political and cultural – which may have contributed
to an awareness of writing norms among writers, translators, copyists, etc., and which may go
some way towards explaining a lack of such well established norms in Poland.

The fricative trill:

/ř/ - rs 13 Prsiemyzzla

/j/ - g 16 geſchze, i 6 iezt, y 27 Yudye

/v/ - v 28 viedyě, w 28 wſſeho, u 5 wzkuieli – there may be a system to the distribution of
graphemic variants. This might be taken from Latin spelling – for Latin this may have had
some phonetic implications.

The vowel quantity is unmarked, with the exception of the long é, occasionally marked as e ͤ :
9 ſſcariotczkeͤ.

Morphology.

Nouns.
Verbs:

participles:
open-stem s-type (1 zzie rozhnyewaw) past active participle; it’s good to identify the
morphological
4th paradigm nt-type (2 zzipie)
l-type preterit (n. 12 zzie zztalo; m. 16 byl… dyetye; m. 22 prolil; m. 37 dyrsal wſſe
wlazzty okolnye, m. 20 muzzil… zznyty) – they are past tense forms, which always agreed

imperative (3rd sg. 6 viz, lacking OCz i-ending but this is a new form; 1st pl. 10 znamenaymy,
lacking MCz -me-ending but also different from -ěmy-ending of OCz (Lamprecht et al.:236))

aorists:
sigmatic (3rd sg. 2 puzzty, 4 zgiedowi, 5 wzkuieli)

pluperfect (3rd sg. m. 21 byl wſſiem powolil)

passive (auxiliary with n-/t-type participle): (3 rd sg. m. pret. 35 byl chzcty zbawen; 3rd sg. m.
praes. 36 Pilat w nyey zza pozztawen) – this is a short form, ‘postawen’ and ‘zbawen’, not
postaweni and zbaweni

Phonology.

Sound changes carried through:

‘a>ě (refl. pron. 1 zzie; 2nd sg. acc. clit. pron. tye; nom./acc.? sg. n. 16 dyetye; f. nom. sg. 24
zemie, voc. sg. n. 23 plemie)

development of syllabic liquids (3rd sg. m. pret. 37 dyrsal (here with an accompanying vowel)
(Lamprecht et al.:76))

g>h (indef. pron. m. gen. sg. 28 wſſeho; comp. adj. 30 horſſim horſſims)

depalatalization (f. acc. pl. 32 rsieky cf. MCz řě>ře řeky;

Depalatalization –

Sound changes not carried through:

‘u>’i (m. inst. sg. 18 liudem; f. loc. sg. 34 zemiu; m. nom. pl. 28 liudyě)

///

*How do we tell depalatalisation occurred?

Miles:

55 Hi by Yudas moczen dworu (dworu is a locative without the preposition moczen w dworu).

59 by geho wffiu wiecziu wlada (aor. 3rd masc. by; past participle active wlada ‘Judas was
governing’)
60 yakfto dworu, tak poclada (both nouns here in the genivitive)
67 iaks k tomu zzwoy chzazz ius mielo (‘Since its time had already come to that’)

69-71: This is a metaphor stating that the attractiveness of the thing lies in its novelty.
74-75: ‘As when if something is meant to happen it is destined to happen.’

Miles’s phonological points:

Sound changes still to take place:

sě still not se (zzie, the i reflecting the s’e phonological form); the loss of iotation is an
aspect of depalatalisation (historicka depalatalizace). Sě becoming se has two stages. The
Slovak e is a lot more open than the Czech one, which is narrow. Slovak retained the open e
– a confusing point, on which you should follow up with Jan.

Line 53 rsiechzi has the trill which is already assimilating from the non-trill r. The
assimilation is another sound change process on which you should follow up with Jan.

Zzwoy – the ó (svój) is still long; it is the subject to diphthongisation ó>uo (svuoj) which was
then monothongised to ů svůj. ó>uo>ů

Juz>jiz; after palatalised consonant u develops into an i. (This will also apply to
environemnts following š and č, which, in the 14th century were still soft.)

76 gmu – the g [j] is a morphological innovation, not a phonological innovation. The [j] likely
comes from iemu (as attested in 78).

61 tyem was monothongized into tím. The y doesn’t tell you if it’s a short or a long softening
of the t.

‘a>ä>ě (That’s how you get a lot of paradigms, like the Czech dušě as opposed to the Polish
dusza). We have no a’s after soft consonants, only ě-e, and later u’s in the 15th century.

One thing neither Miles nor you discuss is the fact that there are diacritics above u’s which
indicate length. On the other hand, there are dots on y’s. These dots seem to distinguish
between [i] and [y] – the dot helps you to distinguish between a back [y] and the front [i] and
[‘i].

Acc.-gen. syncretism to mark animacy appears in the

88 Rubiena – an acc. with gen. ending, an example of animacy.

52, 54 – ruku, oba dual; 54 zzliubiſta – dual sigmatic aorist.

67-68, laczno, wzaczno – these are adverbs (or they are short adjectival forms).