JAZYK V DIELE JOZEFA IGNÁCA BAJZU

This paper reviews the language of J. I. Bajza’s work René mládenca príhody a skúsenosti in terms of several language levels: orthography, phonology, morphology, word formation, vocabulary, syntax. In orthography J. I. Bajza continues in older orthography from a pre-literary period. He has already been using a diacritical orthography, but he is not entirely consistent, because somewhere he still retains the spelling orthography (š -ss). He has incorporated “y” into his orthography, but it is not concerned with an etymological principle. In phonology he preserves some West Slovak phenomena, for example rot-, lot- (otrowa), assibilation (krúciťi), occurrence of šč beside šť (wreščaťi). In morphology in the declension of adjectives he frequently uses suffixes -ího, -ímu instead of -ého, -ému and also dual forms (očima, bubnoma). In word formation, compared to the present condition, more prefixes (načudovať sa, neostríhať sa, nablížiť) are in use. Due to the exotic milieu vocabulary is rich in foreign words (crokodil, kaffee, chokoláda). Many compound words (horemislnosť, wernomluweňí, bradyholec, horedržnosť) are occurred. Very frequent are diminutives and augmentatives ((klobássťička, barančátko, kusisko, sskaredého babska). Besides the language of intellectuals there are also dialectical words (wčil, nisst, sstranek). The novel includes bohemisms (pohádka, mluwiť, choť) as well. In the novel there are very richly represented phrasemes (vstúpiť do srdca, vŕtať hlavu, byť zelený ako žaba). Syntax of the novel is clumsy, unclear, strongly influenced by Latin and German. One of the reasons why J. I. Bajza failed the codification of Slovak language was that he had not collected his codification rules into a coherent textbook and he had been influenced by previous language condition, influence of Czech, Latin and German. For all that J. I. Bajza belongs to predecessors of codification of literary Slovak language before A. Bernolák.