Bengt Gottfried Forselius ja tähed. Täiendusi vana kirjaviisi ja uue õppeviisi mõistmiseks (järg)
Bengt Gottfried Forselius and Letters of the Alphabet: Addenda to Understand the Old Spelling System and a New Teaching Method

Summary/Abstract: Bengt Gottfried Forselius (?1660–1684) is known in Estonian literary history as a spelling reformer. His suggestions, inspired by his experience in teaching Estonian and Swedish peasant children, first materialized in an innovative ABC book written in North Estonian (1685, the oldest survived copy dates from 1694). The idea that the reformed orthography could be applied in Bible translation unleashed a violent linguistic debate called the war of orthographies. The article is an attempt to provide, using the original sources, a more detailed reconstruction of the genesis of Forselius’s orthography of letters. The emerging pattern reveals the connections of Forselius’s reform with earlier Estonian grammars as well as with the linguistic debates elsewhere in Europe. The teaching method used by Forselius resembled the phonetic method of Valentin Ickelsamer, while the names of consonants ke, le, me, etc. introduced by Forselius match the recommendations in the Port-Royal Grammar (1660, VI: Of a new method for easily learning to read in all sorts of languages): „consonants should be named by their natural sound, adding only mute e which is necessary for pronunciation.” To apply the phonetic method more effectively the Estonian alphabet was reduced to 18 letters and the orthography was simplified. The logical and linguistically motivated structure of Forselius’s ABC book differs considerably from that of the available German, Swedish, Finnish and Latvian examples.

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