On the Importance of Studying the Internal History of Literary Languages (on the Example of the Slovak Literary Language)

Abstract

The study of the internal history of a literary language allows you to change ideas about its development, based solely on the history of the external. Internal history is primarily the study of the formation and change of its norm by comparing texts related to different synchronous levels. So, comparisons of the language of translations into the Slovak language of the Holy Bible, carried out in 1756–1759 and 1830, with the codification of A. Bernolak (1787) shows that they represent two different stages of the formation of the same norm, which even codification could not significantly changed, but only corrected, mainly in the field of spelling. In this regard, A. Bernolak's codification is not the initial stage in the development of the Slovak literary language, the origins of which date back to an earlier period.