Valodas jautājumu politizācija un Latvijas Zinātņu akadēmijas Terminoloģijas komisijas pirmie darba gadi ideoloģiska spiediena apstākļos

In the context of political changes related with the soviet occupation, language issues, especially terminology recommendations and spelling rules, were an object of ideological discussions, evaluating each individual fact from the positions of “progressive” or “reactionary”. After the loss of national independence in the summer of 1940, the contradictory rules of 1938 and 1939 of the government of Kārlis Ulmanis on Latvian orthography were abolished, emphasizing this step as care for the Latvian language. Restoring the orthography that was in force between 1922 and 1938, it was promised that all spelling ambiguities would be resolved by an official orthographic dictionary. However, the preparation of such dictionary took a longer time, and it was already published during the Nazi occupation, becoming an object of criticism after the second Soviet occupation. At the same time as the Terminology and Spelling Commission was established in May 1945, the Communist Party’s main newspaper “Cīņa” published a sharp criticism of the previous linguistic practice. Linguists were criticized for their tendency to archaize the language, make unmotivated changes in terms, and avoid borrowings from non-Baltic languages. In 1946, the new orthographic rules were adopted that were close in nature to those proposed in 1938. Criticism regarding language issues continued after the establishment of the Terminology Committee of the Latvian Academy of Sciences because the majority of the examples of “reactionary” decisions in language were taken from the terminological lexis. Particularly sharp criticism of the Terminology Commission was frequent in the press in 1948 and 1949, when the first terminology bulletins were published. The chairman of the Terminology Commission was repeatedly replaced (from 1946 to November 1948 Prof. Matvejs Kadeks, then until December 1951 Kārlis Krauliņš and then Pēteris Valeskalns). Active criticism of linguists (including extensive articles by Andrejs Upīts and Arturs Ozols in 1951) continued until March 1952, when language issues and current problems of Latvian linguistics were summarized by Arvīds Pelše, the chief ideologist of the Latvian Communist Party. Only then did the ideological pressure on language issues relax a little.