Abstract
The talk focuses on three Czech translations of the Latin Historia Bohemica by Eneas Silvius: by Jan Húska (1478), Mikuláš Konáč of Hodištkov (1510) and Daniel Adam of Veleslavín (1585). These differ in the reception - the first one is only a manuscript, the latter two were printed -, in the level of the translator's skills - the first one, again, is considered to be a primitive translation -, as well as in the handling of the author's attacks against the Hussite movement.
These translations were already assessed from the historical point of view, regarding their different influence and translators' tendencies (Kopecký 1962). My previous linguistic analysis of these translations (Martínek 2015) was focused on the stylistic use of Czech light verb constructions and its dependency on the original Latin formulations.
The task of this talk is to present a lexical analysis of the three translations, comparing their lexicon with general tendencies in the Czech language development. There is a lot of hapax legomena or very rarely used Old Czech word formations attested in Húska's translation, which may be related to the Moravian origin of the translator.
With its newly formed negative adjectives or prefixed verbs, mainly with a clear response in the Latin original text, this translation indicates new ways for the Czech lexicon, which were opened at the very end of the Old Czech period (this fact may also be of interest for recent discussions about the periodisation of the Czech language development). Besides this word formation analysis, the talk gives an overview about the stabilized Czech lexicon by Konáč and Adam, two Humanist authors.
Using language corpora tools, the (ir)regularity in the translation of stereotypical Latin formulations will be searched and a comparative analysis with a larger corpus of Early Modern Czech texts will be done. By these two examples, the situation of the Czech language at the beginning of the Early Modern period will be demonstrated, focussing also on the (dis)continuity of lexical and word formation means from Medieval to New Czech.