Jakub Arbes was a well-known Czech writer who died in 1914 and is known as the creator of a specific sort of short novel, called the romaneto. His work, however, is written in a language which is not completely understandable to the contemporary reader. Between the last decade of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century the Czech literary language changed rapidly and significantly in its morphology (e.g. the forms of noun cases), syntax (e.g. the structure of the passive), the lexicon (the meanings of many words and the styles ascribed to them), as well as word order rules. Supposedly, the classical literary Czech language changed much more substantially than did English, French or German during this period of time. But the reception of the classic Czech literature in the public and among literary historians has not followed this evolution of language as far as the classical Czech literary canon is concerned. Contrary to evident facts, most of the public and the literary historians have resisted the need to translate this outdated system of Czech into the new system of our time. The inevitable result will be the relegation of this literature to the status of museum piece. This article is a first step on the path to a new reception of this outdated Czech literary language.
The article concerns primarily the distribution of the single-word conjunction aniž and its synonyms, which are the compounds bez toho, aby/bez toho, že and the most complex form bez toho, aniž by. The author argues that this complex conjunction, which consists of four words (the word aniž itself being, form the historical point of view, a fusion of three words - a - ni - ž), is a problematic innovation in contemporary standard Czech. The reason is that the shorter innovation of bez toho, aby or bez toho, že was invented (or adopted from other languages) after November 1989 to replace the singleword aniž probably for stylistic reasons (aniž being felt as strongly formal or literary). Now, the most complex bez toho, aniž by combines the newly used bez toho, aby/že with the formal aniž, which, in fact, should have been replaced by the bez toho, aby/že. a fully non-functional device thus appears within the system of Czech conjunctions and only future usage will determine whether this will be adopted in standard Czech. As the corpus findings show now, the single-word aniž is much more frequent in written standard Czech than both the bez toho, aby/že variant and the most complex bez toho, aniž by.