Jungmann Square: The Man Who Rebuilt a Language
Why is it significant?
Find the bronze gentleman seated high on his pedestal in the middle of the square, calm and slightly tired, as if he has just finished a very long book. He is Josef Jungmann, and without him the Czech you have been reading on every street sign today might look rather different.
Key Facts
| Place | Jungmann Square: The Man Who Rebuilt a Language |
|---|---|
| Address | Jungmannovo nám., 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.08320, 14.42290 |
| Part of Walk | Kafka's Prague: A Literary Walk Through the Writers' City |
| Generated | Generated |
Find the bronze gentleman seated high on his pedestal in the middle of the square, calm and slightly tired, as if he has just finished a very long book. He is Josef Jungmann, and without him the Czech you have been reading on every street sign today might look rather different.
Around 1800, Czech was in serious trouble. After two centuries of Habsburg rule, the educated people of Prague spoke and wrote German. Czech lived on in villages, in kitchens, in hymns, but many believed it could never again be a language of science, philosophy or poetry. Jungmann, a schoolteacher, set out to prove them wrong.
His weapons were translation and a dictionary. In 1811 he published a Czech translation of Milton's Paradise Lost, a demonstration that the language could carry the grandest poetry in Europe. Then, between 1834 and 1839, came his Czech-German dictionary in five volumes, with well over a hundred thousand entries. Where Czech lacked a word, he dug one out of old texts, borrowed one from another Slavic language, or simply coined it. Many of those coinages are now so ordinary that Czechs have no idea they were ever new.
That is the strange beauty of the Czech National Revival: a nation rebuilt first in grammars, dictionaries and theatre plays, and only later in politics. By the time this monument was unveiled in 1878, Czech had its own theatres and newspapers, and a few years later Prague's university split to give it a Czech half. The writers had won the argument before the politicians did.
Kafka grew up at the end of this story, a German speaker in a city turning Czech around him. He spoke Czech well, and his first translator into it was Milena Jesenská, the journalist he wrote some of his most famous letters to. Now walk north along Na Můstku and through the market street of Rytířská to the Gothic bay window of the oldest university in Central Europe.