Jazyk – jeho český příběh

It is impossible to make sense of the modern linguistic world of the Czech language with all of its magnitude and diversity or to find one's way through all of its complex twists without the cooperation of all of its co-creators throughout history and without grasping their ideas. Authentic texts, ranging from those written by Saint Constantine in the 9th-century Great Moravian Kingdom, through texts authored by František Václav Pelc and Jan Kollár at the turn of the 19th century, offer this grasp through a dialogue with these distant co-creators, a dialogue that the readers can join in. This interaction surpasses the seemingly unsurpassable; history ceases to be a mere sum of remote dates or events obscured by time, and becomes an active element in the reader’s individual information environment, for whom becomes a living textbook of the linguistic and ecological present, linguistic ethics, aesthetics and empathy. Here, the mother tongue of everyone is elevated to a workshop, in which its owner (not a mere speaker) and his intellect, as well as his emotional and spiritual life, are formed. Even more – the reader will also understand why the Prague School teaches that a language system cannot be a language unless we are immersed in it (B. Trnka).