Page:The life & times of Master John Hus by Count Lützow.djvu/330

 on the same level as the most heinous sins. How little the popular feeling among the Bohemians has changed in the period of nearly five centuries that divides us from the time of Hus is proved by the fact that almost all political interest in Bohemia in the present day centres in the “question of languages,” the Sprachenfrage, as the Germans call it.

Hus’s endeavours to strengthen and develop his native language were, however, by no means limited to the purely negative task of opposing the encroachments of the German tongue. He well knew that his own language, to become exclusively the language of the state and of the scholars of Bohemia, required development and improvement in many respects; even as regards such elementary matters as orthography great disorder prevailed; no generally accepted rules existed. In the scanty written documents and in the language of the people there still remained many traces of the different dialects from which the Bohemian language originally sprang. Hus first attempted to establish a universally recognised written language for the whole extensive district—including Moravia and Silesia as well as Bohemia proper—in which the Bohemian language is spoken. He first attempted a task in which the revivers of the Bohemian tongue in the nineteenth century were finally and definitely successful. These men were indeed greatly indebted to Hus, as well as later to the writers of the Bohemian brotherhood. While residing at Prague Hus had already directed his attention to the improvement of his native language. The result of these studies was his Orthographia Bohemica, which probably dates from the year 1411. The Bohemians had, in distinction from many other Slavic races, adopted the Latin characters, which are inadequate to render many sounds peculiar to Slavic speech. Many different attempts had been made to obviate this