Puristic Attitudes to German Phraseological and Syntactic Calques in the Slavic Languages of the Former Habsburg Empire

Abstract

Despite significant differences in the profiles of purism in the central Slavic languages of the former Habsburg Empire, there is one central concern common to all of them: Germanisms. While most attention has focused on the lexicon, a potentially more damaging and intractable problem was the need to deal with syntactical and phraseological calques. The present paper discusses the calques which purists in the Czech, Slovak, Croatian and Slovene speech communities have singled out for censorship. Instead of attempting to draw up comprehensive lists of offending items, they settled for assembling representative examples. There are many parallels among the lists drawn up for the four language communities. This is attributable to their common exposure to German and the awareness of puristic intervention in other communities. Opponents of purism, led by the Prague School, pointed out that language contact inevitably leads to a degree of convergence and that many of the phrases and constructions perceived to be of German origin were common Europeanisms. Purists were also faced with the task of finding alternatives and encouraging their use among their compatriots. An analysis of the contemporary standards reveals that their objections to syntactic constructions modeled on German were rewarded with success but their efforts with respect to phraseological calques were largely in vain.