Iš Valstybinės lietuvių kalbos komisijos veiklos

O V E R V I E W S, I N F O R M A T I O N FROM THE ACTIVITIES OF THE STATE COMMISSION OF THE LITHUANIAN LANGUAGE (Prepared on the basis of the 2010 report of the Language Commission) LANGUAGE PROGRAMMES The main aims and objectives of the Language Commission’s activities are implemented through language programmes approved by the Government of the Republic of Lithuania. In 2010, the Programme for the Standardisation, Use, Development and Dissemination of the State Language for 2006–2015 and the Programme for the Preservation of Dialects and Ethnic Place Names for 2001–2010 continued to be implemented, as did the programme “Legal and Administrative Supervision of the State Language.” Most of the work carried out under the programmes is ongoing. Several electronic databases were completed: the Database of Historical Ethnic (Lithuanian Borderland and Outlying) Place Names, the database of cards from the Atlas of the Lithuanian Language, the Corpus of Lithuanian Dialect Texts, and the database of dialectal material from the northeastern Vilnius area. Under the programme, dialect publications were also prepared and published by the Institute of the Lithuanian Language: Vytautas Kardelis’s Texts from the Surroundings of Dūkštas, Vytautas Kardelis et al.’s Eastern Aukštaitians of the Vilnius Region, and Asta Balčiūnienė et al.’s Eastern Aukštaitians of Kupiškis. In 2010, expeditions to collect dialect data continued to be organized, the Digital Dialect Sound Archive was developed, and dictionaries and texts of various dialects were prepared for research and educational purposes. In 2010, 1,778 publications in 48 titles—scholarly journals and collections of research articles, terminology dictionaries, place-name dictionaries, dialect texts and dictionaries, monographs, editions of monuments of early Lithuanian writing, textbooks and other books—were purchased and provided free of charge to public libraries of universities, colleges, counties, national significance, and municipalities. Funds from this programme continued to support the preparation of terminology dictionaries and editions of monuments of early Lithuanian writing, the teaching of professional language in higher education institutions, research projects, state-language courses for residents of Lithuania whose native language is not Lithuanian, and the expansion of the Terminology Bank of the Republic of Lithuania with electronic terminology-dictionary data. Iš Valstybinės lietuvių kalbos komisijos veiklos 277 institutions, research projects, state-language courses for residents of Lithuania whose native language is not Lithuanian, and the expansion of the Terminology Bank of the Republic of Lithuania with electronic terminology-dictionary data. LEGAL PROTECTION OF THE STATE LANGUAGE A proposal was submitted to the Education, Science and Culture Committee of the Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania to include in the draft new version of the Law on Education a provision requiring teachers to use correct Lithuanian in the educational process (the provision was included in the law). The Secretariat of the State Commission of the Lithuanian Language prepared a draft resolution of the Government of the Republic of Lithuania of 7 July 2010 No. 998 “On the Coordination of the Lithuanian-Language Terminology of Draft European Union Legal Acts”1. The purpose of this resolution is to ensure the clarity and accuracy of provisions in Lithuanian-language drafts of European Union (hereinafter, the EU) legal acts, and the consistency of terminology in these drafts with the terminology used in legal acts of the Republic of Lithuania. The Description of the Procedure for Coordinating the Lithuanian-Language Terminology of Draft EU Legal Acts was approved. Under this procedure, public authorities must coordinate with the State Commission of the Lithuanian Language any questions concerning terminology received from EU institutions. Comments were submitted to the Ministry of Culture on the draft Government resolution of the Republic of Lithuania “On Approval of the Concept for the Intended Legal Regulation of the Law of the Republic of Lithuania on National Minorities.” The Commission objected to the provision of the concept under which traditional names in the languages of national minorities could be given alongside the official names of topographical features in the state language. In the opinion of the State Commission of the Lithuanian Language, providing such unofficial names would narrow the scope for using official names in the state language. Proposals concerning the draft Regulations on Doctoral Studies were submitted to the Education, Science and Culture Committee of the Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania: the doctoral dissertation must be written in correct Lithuanian; a summary of the dissertation in Lithuanian is required (if the dissertation is written in a foreign language); and, where the dissertation defence is conducted in another language, it must be translated into Lithuanian. All the proposals were taken into account. By resolution of the State Commission of the Lithuanian Language, on 8 October the Research Programme for the Functioning and Change of Standard Lithuanian, Dialects and Other Varieties of Language, 2011– 1 Valstybės žinios, 2010, Nr. 84-4417. 278 KALBOS KULTŪRA | 84 2020, was approved. The purpose of the Programme is to develop and promote research into the functioning of Lithuanian in a multilingual environment, and into processes of change and interaction among standard Lithuanian, dialects and other varieties of language. IMPLEMENTATION OF THE LAW ON THE TERM BANK OF THE REPUBLIC OF LITHUANIA Work continued on compiling and managing the online Lithuanian terminology resource—the Term Bank of the Republic of Lithuania. During the year, 1,122 articles on terms approved for use in legal acts or proposed for use in them were published in the Term Bank. At the end of 2010, the Term Bank contained a total of 154,131 term articles: 6,240 approved, 146,770 recommended, and 1,121 not recommended. STANDARDIZATION AND EXPERT ACTIVITIES Seven meetings of the State Commission of the Lithuanian Language were held. Ninety-three subcommittee meetings were held: Terminology Subcommittee – 51, Textbook Subcommittee – 14, Dictionary Subcommittee – 11, Names Subcommittee – 10, Pronunciation and Stress Subcommittee – 3, Temporary “Translation Guide” Subcommittee – 2, and working group for the new programme development project – 2. Approximately 300 expert opinions were prepared for various institutions and individuals on personal names, place names, terms and concepts, company and institution names, the language of documents, etc. Terminology. At meetings of the State Commission of the Lithuanian Language, the manuscript of the Explanatory Dictionary of Electrical Engineering Terms was considered and favorably evaluated; 2 Lithuanian terminology standards and more than 1,000 legal-act terms were approved. Four resolutions adopted in the minutes2 were adopted concerning the Lithuanian names of certain plants. At subcommittee meetings, four terminology dictionaries and two terminology standards were considered, as were plant names from various EU documents; problematic names of ornamental plants, crustaceans, and mollusks were discussed. Individual terms submitted by various institutions and organizations were also considered. 2 Resolutions are published on the State Commission of the Lithuanian Language website and in the legal acts database of the Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania. Iš Valstybinės lietuvių kalbos komisijos veiklos 279 Approximately 700 consultations on terminology, the replacement of foreign words, and botanical and zoological nomenclature were provided by email and telephone. The majority of those consulted were translators, editors, and terminologists from EU institutions, as well as Lithuanian civil servants, employees of private institutions, and other interested parties. Place names. The list “Names of Places on the Lakes of Trakai” compiled by the Trakai Historical National Park Directorate was approved. There are few toponymic data for the Vilnius region, which makes this work particularly valuable. More than 200 opinions on place names were provided to municipalities, mostly on the correctness of street names (more than 1,000 names were assessed). By resolutions of the State Commission of the Lithuanian Language, the lists of names of the world’s states, their capitals, territories and regions, and their inhabitants were revised. The third volume of the dictionary World Place Names, commissioned by the State Commission of the Lithuanian Language, was published: Africa. Antarctica. Australia. Oceania (Science and Encyclopaedia Publishing Centre). At expert meetings, the adaptation of place names for the forthcoming volume Asia was discussed. Personal names. In 2010, more than 200 applications to change personal names were examined. The most common request was to shorten a surname by removing the Slavic patronymic suffixes -evič- (-avič-) (25) and -ausk- (10); in other cases, surnames were shortened by dropping the formants -ajev-, -eck-, -ën-, -in-, -insk-, -ov (-ovič, -ovsk-), -unsk-, -ušk-. A database of the names of citizens of the Republic of Lithuania and a subsite of the State Commission of the Lithuanian Language website vardai.vlkk.lt. were developed together with the information solutions company UAB “NTSG”. Grammar, spelling, and punctuation. The Temporary “Translation Guide” Subcommittee began advising the compilers of the “European Union Institutions Translation Guide.” The subcommittee’s task is to advise the compilers so that the publication conforms as closely as possible to the norms of standard Lithuanian. The subcommittee, comprising specialists in grammar, terminology, and translation, as well as legal editors, considered standard formulations frequently used in EU documents and recommended the most suitable options. Stress. A recommendation was approved by a resolution adopted in the minutes on December 9, 2010, “On the Stressing of Short Forms of the Masculine Singular and Plural Nominative of Active Present Participles”: the stress patterns of short forms such as kalbąs, kalbą, tylįs, tylį, vaidinąs, vaidiną were regulated. The resolution adopted in the minutes “On the Use of Stress Variants” emphasized that approved alternative stress patterns (variants) are considered equivalent. 280 KALBOS KULTŪRA | 84 Lexicon. On 28 October 2010, a recommendatory List of Foreign Word Equivalents was approved by a protocol resolution. Textbook evaluation. The Textbook Evaluation Subcommittee reviewed 47 general education textbooks (some textbooks comprised several parts; 74 textbook manuscript volumes were reviewed in total). A mark certifying linguistic correctness was granted immediately to 53 books; 17 books were returned to publishers for correction (three books were returned as many as three times). In 2010, no textbooks were rejected outright (that is, none failed to meet the correctness requirements on the third review). There have been no such textbooks for two years now, so textbook preparation has improved considerably compared with 2007 and 2008. OTHER WORK Letters were prepared and sent to the Ministry of Justice, the Seimas Committee on Legal Affairs and Law Enforcement, and the Seimas Legal Department concerning the sometimes unjustified complexity of the language of legislation, which can make legal provisions incomprehensible. The working group for “Palemonas,” the Lithuanian computer font commissioned by the State Commission of the Lithuanian Language, in cooperation with the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative community (Medieval Unicode Font Initiative), created a font variant called “Palemonas MUFI” for collecting and publishing old writings (see http://www.mufi.info/fonts/). About 36,000 language consultations were provided, including about 13,200 online and about 22,800 by telephone. The Internet Language Consultation Bank database was supplemented with more than 450 new entries during the year; the bank now contains over 9,000 headwords. The third Lithuanian language competition “Clean Language – Clear Mind” took place on 22–26 February (organizers: AB “Tilde IT,” the Ministry of Education and Science, the State Commission of the Lithuanian Language, and the public relations agency Strategic Communications Centre). The aim of the competition was to encourage pupils to use Lithuanian characters and correct Lithuanian in the electronic environment. In 2010, eight and a half thousand pupils in grades 6–10 from all over Lithuania took part. Received 2011 11 21 JŪRATĖ PALIONYTĖ State Commission of the Lithuanian Language Gedimino pr. 60, LT-01110 Vilnius [email protected] Iš Valstybinės lietuvių kalbos komisijos veiklos 281