Early Modern High German of Heinrich Polan's Court Regulations (1550)

This paper deals with Polan's work Court Regulations which represents the actualisation and amendment of legal information described in the Law Book of Meissen, which was a very important document in the field of administration and law in Olomouc between 1390 and 1709. Since Polan's document has not been examined profoundly, the aim of this article is to introduce his idiolect as the author of the Court Regulations, with a particular focus on its modern phenomena which illustrate how unifying tendencies gradually gained ground in Early Modern High German. Some dialect phenomena are pointed out which reveal the author's origin or places where he had lived before. It is concluded that the language of the Court Regulations corresponds with the writing practices of the Olomouc municipal office of that time. It is shown that Jindrich Polan, who hailed from the east middle German language area where he had studied and worked for several years, was able to effortlessly adapt his way of writing to the writing practices of the Olomouc municipal office. However, as also pointed out in the paper, there still remain some aspects of his work that do not seem to correspond entirely to the writing practices of the Olomouc municipal office.