Lukáš Machala, vice-chairman of the STVR Council, has once again become the target of criticism and unwanted attention. His statements about the decline of language culture in the public media are to blame for this. The right hand of the Minister of Culture Martina Šimkovičová proposed, to use the abbreviation USA instead of the abbreviation USA like the United States of America. He also suggested that in the past journalists were fined for language offenses and a similar system should be returned.
The Internet was filled with reactions to the statements made at Tuesday’s STVR Council meeting. Former adviser to Prime Minister Robert Fico and political analyst Eduard Chmelár also took up the word. According to him, the decline of language culture in the media is no small thing, but the civil servant sets bad examples.
„The unfortunate statement of the general secretary of the service office of the Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic, Lukáš Machala, who suggested making abbreviations illegal and fining editors for language offenses, once again caused a storm in a glass of water and shifting the meaning of his words to somewhere where politics weakens and deals with secondary topics or even invented scandals,” he wrote in the introduction of the status.
He added that at SŠA, Machala did not speak completely to the wind. It is really a Slovak abbreviation for the United States of America, except that this term is already archaic and stopped being used in the middle of the last century. „You cannot force its return by command or fine. “Language is a dynamic tool, and its form is mainly decided by active users,” the expert emphasized. He himself, for example, refuses to follow the rules from 1991, which banned Hungarian surnames.
„I stick to what these noble families were called, because this is the road to hell – we end up like in Russian, where all foreign surnames are transcribed phonetically. You can still recognize that Einstein is Einstein and Newton is Newton, but with lesser-known names, you have no chance to identify their true form. And I work with these names most often – in research, scientific studies, journalism – not some editor of the SAS Linguistics Institute who invented it and bound the users of the language by it,” continued Chmelár.
He publicly proved Machal right about one thing. „The language culture of our media has long been appalling and unacceptable in a public environment. However, you set a very bad example for it. Foreign words are the most disliked for Slovak. It is characterized by bad pronunciation (for example, Machal’s hard dialect, but he is not an editor), not using lengths, interventions in the structure of the language (“see you” instead of “see you” and the like). This cannot be laughed at,” he emphasized.
Unlike the vice-chairman of the STVR Council, Chmelár would make the consequences for mistakes even tougher. „It is not enough to fine such linguistic barbarians who do not work on themselves, they must be fired. In the past, they wouldn’t even get into the editing room on television or radio, that was a basic condition, that’s why to this day, we still admire the legendary TV announcers, because they influenced the whole society as models of Slovak language culture – see the recently awarded Alena Heribanová,” paid tribute to the TV star.
„So, please, let’s not underestimate this question, let’s not make a caricature of it, it’s not a small thing. However, STVR does not need a slob, but at least a language advisor. Cultured speech should be an absolutely self-evident and non-negotiable condition for employment in public service media. We want to hear beautiful literary Slovak from the TV screen. The rest are nonsense,” said Chmelár.
