The Renewal of Czech Church Slavonic

This article provides a linguistic characterisation of Josef Vajs’ work on developing and creating new norms in Church Slavonic (acr. CS) for the Croatian and Czech environments of the time. We attempt to follow Vajs’ reflections on the nature of a liturgical language for the twentieth century, placing them in the context of the development of Croatian CS and the New CS used by Greek Catholic (Uniate) and Orthodox believers. Although our primary focus is Vajs’ Služebnik ‘Liturgy’ of 1922, we provide brief linguistic comparisons of numerous period texts printed in the Croatian and Czech milieus. The article may thus also serve as a brief history of Croatian and Czech CS texts at the outset of the twentieth century. The analysis of the Služebnik shows that Josef Vajs’ project of a new CS norm was an attempt to combine highly divergent linguistic elements referring to Czech, Slovak, and East Slavic. The Croatian CS base, which is primarily a transcription of Vajs’ revised reedition of Dragutin Parčić’s missal, includes selected features from the only original (Old) CS texts from the West Slavic area (Kyiv Folia and Prague Fragments) and explicit references to modern Czech and Slovak. The unionist aspect of this linguistic fusion lies in including features that seem to refer to the CS norm used by the Orthodox and Greek Catholic Churches.