Václav Jan Rosa

Václav Jan Rosa , also (incorrectly) Jan Václav Rosa , (* around 1620 in Zdice , † August 11, 1689 in Prague ) was a Czech lawyer, poet and philologist.

Life

Rosa studied at the Art and Law Faculty of Charles University in Prague. He then worked as a lawyer. In 1670 he became a judge at the Prague Court of Appeal, in 1680 a clerk at the Bohemian governorship. He was also ennobled for his services.

Rosa's first work, the Discursus Lypirona ... from 1651 was dedicated to his future wife and deals with the story of a sad gentleman and about love. The extensive text, which was never printed, adopted many elements from European gallant poetry and is one of the few secular works of its time.

In later years Rosa devoted herself mainly to grammar. The result of his work is the book Čechořečnost, seu Grammatica linguae Bohemicae (1672), a grammar of Czech written in Latin, which is composed of four parts, namely the

1. Orthographia
2. Etymologia
3. Syntaxis
4. Prosodia

The grammar had a great impact, especially in the 18th century. a. as a model for the grammars of Václav Jandyt and Johann Wenzel Pohl . Later it was heavily criticized , especially because of the fourth part, which suggests many neologisms , and was taken as evidence of the incipient decline in language. It was not until the 20th century that Rosa’s achievements began to receive greater appreciation, especially in the area of ​​grammatical terminology. For example, he is now considered the first author to adequately describe the verbal aspect .

As his main work, Rosa himself saw his dictionary Thesaurus linguae Bohemicae , on which he worked until his death and which gives their Latin and German equivalents to numerous Czech words in four volumes. This dictionary has not been printed to this day, but has been used extensively by many researchers, including the lexicographer Josef Jungmann . Today a working group at the Philosophical Faculty of the Charles University is working on preparing the extensive and sometimes difficult to read text for printing.

literature

• F. Kopečný: "K dobrým počátkům české gramatické tradice". In: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach , 9, 1982, pp. 257–283.
• J. Vintr: "Václav Jan Rosa and the older Czech grammatography". In: Wiener Slavistisches Jahrbuch , 37, 1991, pp. 93-101.

Web links

• Literature and other media by and about Václav Jan Rosa in the catalog of the National Library of the Czech Republic
• Literature by and about Václav Jan Rosa in the catalog of the German National Library