Prof. Eva Hajičová has been representing the Czech linguistic world in CIPL for decades, served CPL as a member of the Executive Committee for many years and organized the 17th International Congress of Linguists in Prague in 2003. Nevertheless, she never thought of becoming a linguist when she was a young girl. ‘I wanted to be a teacher, whatever subject to teach,’ she answers when she was asked how she came to linguistics. ‘My father was a teacher so I had a good example.’
Interview by Camiel Hamans
‘I went to school during the German occupation. Thus German was compulsory. My parents realized that knowledge of a foreign language was essential for any further career and stimulated me to learn Russian, although it was still during the war. English was added at grammar school. I had a talent for languages, although I also liked mathematics very much. When I was eighteen, I had to choose what kind of further education I wanted to pursue. I would have liked to do mathematics, but then you also had to take physics. I hated that subject at school. Thus, I went to the Faculty of Arts and turned to Czech and English, still with the idea of becoming a teacher.
Vilém Fried
I went to university, the Charles University to which I am still affiliated, in 1953 and I was lucky. There were still a few prominent figures of the Prague School teaching. In the English department there was the eminent linguist Bohumil Trnka. Another prominent anglicist and general linguist Josef Vachek, who had a chair in Brno, often came to Prague and in the Czech department I listened to lectures of the leading Czech syntactician Vladimír Šmilauer. When I graduated in 1958, I still wasn’t thinking about research, since teaching was my dream. My first job was as a teacher of Czech, history and gymnastics at a primary school. That was not exactly what I had dreamed of. A year later, I was appointed as a teacher at a grammar school, where I taught Czech and English.It was the influence and the work of Vilém Fried, then a lesser-known member of the Prague School, who sparked my interest in research. Fried, a Jew, who left the country after the Russian invasion in 1968 and who ended his career at the University of Duisburg, was interested in language teaching and how the research of the Prague School could be helpful in language teaching. In 1972 he published a study The PragueSchool of Linguistics and Language Teaching with Oxford University Press. Fried was a great supervisor, who knew how to encourage young researchers. He formed a student research group, of which I became a member.
Peter Sgall
When I was a teacher I continued to go to the university for the meetings of the Linguistic Society or of the Circle of Modern Philologists. At one of these visits, it must have been 1960 or 1961, I read the announcement of a new course in mathematical linguistics. With my love for math, I got interested. My husband, an engineer, worked with the first computers. So they weren’t completely foreign to me. A combination of linguistics and computers seemed like something to me. Although my child was only two years old, I signed up. There I met Peter Sgall. I had met him before during my studies but then we really got to know each other. Sgall became the other person who drew me into linguistics.I was asked if I had an interest in a faculty position. That was in 1962. I never left Charles University since then, though it was sometimes not easy to survive. Actually, I must say that I was lucky. In 1962 I was asked to join the communist party , which I refused. That could have immediately been the end of my academic career, but apparently it was not ideological sharpeners who were in power within the faculty. Also after 1968, when the Russians invaded Prague, the ideological situation at the arts faculty was critical, our whole department (Laboratory of algebraic linguistics) was supposed to be kicked out but thanks to our friends at a less ideologically-minded faculty of mathematics and physics we managed to stay at the University, became members of their faculty and as such we managed to maintain contact with the outside world through old roads and channels.
Back to Prague School
It was prof. Trnka, who was the spiritual and organizational leader of the linguistic community in Prague, who had many contacts in Prague and abroad. Trnka was among the founding fathers of the Cercle linguistique de Prague in 1926 and had been its secretary practically right till its informal end in the early 1950s. After the Second World War At the 6th International Congress in Paris in 1948, he was elected as one of the members of a committee for linguistic statistics. As secretary of the committee he managed to publish a bibliography about quantitative methods in linguistics with the support of Unesco. It could be said that Trnka saved the Prague School of Linguistics. He gathered a group of linguists around him, who met irregularly but frequently in his office. All participants presented papers and it was there that I really got to know the Prague School. This lasted till the late 80s.
Restart
Shortly before the Velvet Revolution in November 1989, Prof. Oldřich Leška, a specialist in Russian but also a great Czech patriot, suggested to revitalize the Prague School. He investigated when and how the Circle had stopped and found nothing. No document, nothing. Officially and formally, the Circle had never been dissolved. Consequently one could continue, he concluded. With two colleagues he wrote a petition and sent it to the Academy of Sciences, in which they said that since the Circle was never dissolved, they wanted to resume its activities. That happened and February 15th 1990 the Circle officially restarted. Leška became the first new president of the PLK. I had the privilege to serve as its chairperson from 1997 till 2006. We still have meetings each second Monday of the month. We publish our own journal and have a series of book publications with John Benjamins, Prague Linguistic Circle Papers, in which seven volumes have appeared so far. The situation is not easy but the present representatives of the Prague Circle try hard to keep the Circle living and to attract also the younger generation of Czech scholars to get interested in its ideas and activities.
