Teaching Czech in a Plurilingual Community in the Age of Enlightenment: The case of František Jan Tomsa
Abstract
The chapter deals with the complicated situation in the field of first- and second-language teaching in Bohemia at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. First, it sketches briefly the mutual relations of the Czech and German languages in Bohemia, the educational reforms carried out by Empress Maria Theresa and her sons, and their influence on the language situation in primary and secondary schools.
Subsequently, it uses the example of Czech educator and philologist František Jan Tomsa (1751-1814), the economic director of the Normal School Printing House in Prague, translator of primary school textbooks from German into Czech and author of numerous grammatical, orthographical and lexicographical works written both in Czech and German, to demonstrate the polyfunctionality of linguistic works and language textbooks, the uncertainty about their anticipated and real readership, and the multiple functions they fulfilled in the cultural life of the period. It shows that Tomsa not only articulated the outcomes of his linguistic research and his concept of modern cultivated Czech in his grammatical and orthographical works, intended for Czech, German and Slavic elites, but that he also sought to incorporate them into his ranslations of school textbooks.