Language reform
A language reform in the broader sense arises in most cases from the endeavor to unify the people who use this language by standardizing a language and to promote or first achieve their national independence . In Europe, many language reforms therefore took place in the 19th century , an era of heightened national awareness . A distinction must be made between the language reform and the spelling reform , in which only the rules of the written language are changed. Of course there are also mixed forms.
Examples of language reforms
The first attempts to reform the New High German language go back to the endeavors of the Fruitful Society , founded in 1617 . a. Justus Georg Schottelius , especially tried to reform the grammar . Other members were more concerned with the Germanization of Latinisms, and we owe them words like spelling (instead of orthography) and linguistics (instead of grammar). Philipp von Zesen's somewhat bizarre attempt to also reform the spelling, however, failed due to resistance from other members.
For the Greek language , Adamantios Korais (1748–1833) developed the Katharevousa ("the purified one" ) at the beginning of the 19th century , which today can be described as a link between ancient and modern Greek. The vernacular Dimotiki , which has been the colloquial language in Greece , Asia Minor and Constantinople since the Middle Ages , has officially replaced the now outdated Katharevousa since 1976. In the meantime, however, many Katharevousa words penetrated the Dimotiki.
The year of the revolution of 1848 triggered efforts to reform the language among many peoples who belonged to the multi-ethnic state Austria-Hungary . The reforms of the Czech language led, among other things, to the separation of Charles University in Prague into a German and a Czech university. Simultaneous reform of the Slovak language was completed in 1851 under the direction of Ľudovít Štúr .
Several language reforms also took place in the Norwegian language in the course of the 19th century, which eventually led to the separation of Bokmål and Nynorsk . Bokmål is a daughter language of Danish , Nynorsk is based on the Norwegian dialect and is therefore more closely related to Swedish , Icelandic and Faroese .
The Russian language has undergone two main language reforms, the first by Peter the Great , who founded the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1724 , and the second in 1918 after the October Revolution .
Since 1928, the Turkish language has been reproduced using a variant of the Latin script co-developed by Kemal Ataturk (1881–1938) . Ataturk called this new writing system the New Turkish Alphabet and the changeover was called the Letter Revolution . The Istanbul dialect was the basis for the standard language . The earlier written language of Turkish is called Ottoman and was reproduced with the Arabic script . To implement the language reform, Ataturk founded the Turkish Language Society ( Türk Dil Kurumu ).
In China , the classical written language Wenyan was increasingly replaced by Baihua during the 20th century . The most important reform of the Korean language was in 1446 with the introduction of Hangul - alphabet instead.
A special case of language reform is the development of New Hebrew . Elieser Ben-Jehuda (1858–1922) began the hitherto unique attempt to convert a sacred language into a new standard language.
Well-known spelling reforms
- for the Russian language 1917: elimination of three Cyrillic letters .
- for the Danish language 1948 : Replacement of the letter combination Aa by Å .
- for the French language 1990 .
- for the German language : Reform of German spelling from 1996 .
See also
literature
- Geoffrey Lewis: The Turkish Language Reform. A Catastrophic Success . Oxford University Press, 2002, ISBN 978-0-19-925669-3 .
Web links
French spelling reform of 1990 (French)