Old Czech Glosses in Medieval Hebrew Rabbinic Writings

of the dissertation Lenka Uličná This study aims to present and interpret the Old Czech (so-called Canaanic) glosses preserved in medieval Hebrew rabbinic writings Arugath ha-bosem by Abraham ben Azriel, Or zarua by Isaac ben Moses and in the commentary to the Mahzor Nuremberg. So far, linguistic analyses of this language material have been based on the editions. The present work analyzes manuscript versions of the glosses and significantly refines the research. We consider the so-called Canaanic glosses primarily as a sociolinguistic subject and this attitude influenced the selection of methods used in this study. Due to the character of the language material, we had to combine the sociolinguistic methods with methods of contrastive linguistics, paleographic methods and analytical methods of diachronic linguistics. The results of this analysis are presented in dictionary entries and they provide a basis for the following characterization of the so-called Canaanic language and its position towards the so-called Jewish languages on the one hand and towards the Czech language of the Christian majority, on the other. The gloss is i.a. a manifestation of bilingualism of the productor of the text. Being aware of the insufficiency of one language he tries to secure the understanding of a certain term in..