Revolution with a “Human” Face: A Corpus Approach to the Semantics of Czech Lidskost

Abstract

This contribution uses corpus tools to examine the meaning of a Czech word, the abstract noun lidskost, and some of its related forms. Lidskost is usually translated as “humanity,” “humanness,” or “humaneness,” but it has cultural and political import in the Czech(oslovak) context that these English terms lack. It is, for example, associated with the work of the seventeenth-century Czech pedagogue and philosopher Jan Amos Comenius as well as with the humanistic ethos of T. G. Masaryk, the president of the first Czechoslovak Republic (1918–1938), and also with the 1968 Prague Spring movement and the Velvet Revolution that followed two decades later. I first present a semantic-discourse portrait of the word within its larger semantic field, and then investigate English translation equivalents. With this baseline established, I then analyze, in its original Czech as well as in English translation, a lidskost-oriented text from the 1980s written by Vaclav Havel, which provides a map of lidskost as simultaneously a personal and sociopolitical principle, one that can adequately serve as a rallying cry for revolutionary moments in Czech(oslovak) history, if not also beyond.