THE PERSONALITY AND WORK OF MARTIN HATTALA IN THE FIELD OF SLOVAK AND SLAVIC STUDIES BASED ON ARCHIVAL FONTS

Martin Hattala has become widely known as a codifier of the standard Slovak and the significant Slavist. He is accredited the authorship of the codifying work 'Kratka mluvnica slovenská' (A Short Grammar of Slovak) (1852) that became a valid and obligatory standard up to 1902 when it was replaced by Cambel's 'Rukovat spisovnej reci slovenskej' (A Compendium of Standard Slovak Language). He is the author of some Slavistic works such as 'Mluvnica ruska a starobulharská' (A Grammar of Russian and Old Bulgarian) written in Czech, the study 'Kousek cteni o srbcine u korunniho prince Rudolfa' (A Piece of Reading on Serbian at Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria) written in German and 'Mluvnica chorvatska' (A Grammar of Croatian) written in Czech and stored at the Literary Archives of the Memorial of National Literature in Prague. All these works express his opinion that Old Church Slavonic is a starting point of all Slavic languages. Hattala's contacts with European scholars, a creative university environment, his study of Slavic languages and the linguistic works in the field of the Slavic studies, Czech, Bulgarian, Serbian or Russian, the support and confidence he received from the Catholic intelligentsia were his starting point for the standard Slovak language codification. The historical meaning of Martin Hattala's work can be seen in his synthetic efforts for the Slovak language benefit and his analytical approach to the particular Slavic languages.