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Good articleCzech language has been listed as one of the Language and literature good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.
Article milestones
DateProcessResult
September 20, 2014Good article nomineeListed
October 18, 2014Peer reviewReviewed
Did You Know
A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on December 2, 2014.
The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that the Czech language contains a sound, ř (example: "řeka" (river)ⓘ), that does not occur in any other known language?
Current status: Good article

GA push

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I've recently started working on this article in hopes of pushing it to GA status and, possibly later, FA. I don't think any articles on individual languages have reached either status within the past few years, so I'm taking a few liberties with the standards to account for escalating demands, but overall I'm basing it on Swedish language, Nahuatl, and Tamil language. Also, while the Czech ethnic group makes up the largest part of my heritage and I know the language to a moderate degree, my background on Wikipedia is in video games (particularly Sonic the Hedgehog articles), not linguistics, so feel free to correct me if I make any newbie blunders. Tezero (talk) 03:53, 20 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

A noble endeavor! We definitely need more high-quality language articles. Here are a few suggestions:
  • Better figures and sources for total speakers. NE is not terribly reliable in my view. Some clarification about the sources used for the Texas Czechs would be nice too. Is it taken from the US Census? Ref is unclear. Statements like "12,805 Texans can speak the Czech language" should be avoided; opt for "According to Reference XYZ, c. 12,000 residents of Texas reported themselves as speakers of Czech" (assuming it's self-reported).
  • How is Common Czech actually different from "standard Czech"? Both seem to refer to the standard language, so how can there be two of them?
  • Keep phonology separate from orthography. Spelling and pronunciation are two very different things. IPA transcription should be added for phonology, not just plain Czech.
  • Harkins (1952) seems like a somewhat dated reference. It would be great if it could be complemented with more recent sources.
Peter Isotalo 11:00, 20 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Standard Czech = the written standard language, Common Czech = the normal spoken language in most of Bohemia and some parts of Moravia where local dialects aren't spoken. Some declension and conjugation endings differ between the two, and there are phonological changes as well. Standard Czech can obviously be spoken, it is on TV and radio for example. I guess that is the real standard language. I will try to find some sources when I come back from holiday. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 16:15, 20 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
That seems like a rather unusual way of dividing up a standard language. More details (and references) would be nice. But I'm quite skeptical to the idea that there would be a "spoken written standard". It sounds more like a simple formal register. Modern standard languages are all influenced by the written standards, but even formal speech is by definition very distinct from written language.
Peter Isotalo 18:31, 20 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
FWIW, Dialects will be one of the last sections I work on, so you two will have time to decide how segmented we should represent Czech to be. Tezero (talk) 19:50, 20 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I'm definitely not an expert on Czech language policies, just observing that it looks odd from what I've seen. Just make sure your sources are actual linguists or authorities like the Institute of the Czech Language.
Peter Isotalo 20:13, 20 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I agree. Keep in mind that if a source isn't one of those in References (i.e. the actual bibliography), I haven't gone through it yet. I've already noticed, actually, that the 10.0 million figure's citation looks unsatisfactory, but I have not yet sought an alternative. Tezero (talk) 20:17, 20 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Well it didn't take me long to find a usable source from the Czech language institute about "spoken written Czech" [1]. Actually this article discusses more registers (artistic, technical/non-technical etc), I'm not sure how many would be useful to cover on this page. As for dialects, most sources divide Czech into four main dialects - Bohemian, Central Moravian, Eastern Moravian, Lach/Silesian (see for example this. I've worked a fair bit on the article Moravian dialects representing the latter three in subsections, so we could probably just cover the differences between Bohemian and Moravian on here. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 05:28, 21 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You know, that article isn't bad, filelakeshoe. If you trimmed down the intro significantly, corroborated a few unsourced statements, and formatted a few of the sources, it would look like GA material to me. Anyway, this page is definitely coming along, if I do say so myself. Are you still interested in contributing/correcting information about Czech dialects here, or should I handle that myself? Tezero (talk) 19:52, 22 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Just so you all know, I'm gonna put this up at GAN as soon as everything's cited and looks reasonably nice, which should be either today or tomorrow. Other changes can still be made after the fact, of course. Tezero (talk) 18:58, 26 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, snap. Tezero (talk) 21:02, 26 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks very much for your work on this, I'm back home now and have had time to read through. Just a few questions:
  • Do East Slavic languages not distinguish between hard and soft consonants, moreso even than Czech and Slovak?
  • It was the second paragraph in the "classification" section which said Czech is different from East and South slavic in that it distinguishes hard and soft consonants. As far as I know, all Slavic languages do this to some extent, South Slavic very minimally, but East Slavic and Polish use it more than Czech (and the ref says so about Polish) – filelakeshoe (t / c) 16:06, 30 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Czech and Slovak speakerrs understand each other "more so than speakers of most pairs of languages within the West, East, or South Slavic branches." – is this explicitly stated in the source? I find it questionable - with East Slavic, most people in Belarus/Ukraine have the advantage of knowing Russian as well, and it depends on how much we're segmenting South Slavic, whether Bulgarian and Macedonian are really separate, etc. (I think Wikipedia rightly takes the general stance that BCS is one language) – filelakeshoe (t / c) 10:25, 28 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Czech is one of the most highly inflected languages in the world" - again, is that explicitly stated in a source which discusses "world languages?" It sounds like the sort of thing a Czech person would say but I find it dubious, even in Europe, Finnish Estonian and Hungarian have a whole load more cases and verb forms than Slavic languages, and I'd wager some of those Native American languages and Georgian outclass even them. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 10:25, 28 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
    • Regarding "most highly inflected": it's your basic native speaker focus on stressing uniqueness. It's probably been a part of virtually every language article by now. Czech grammar seems no more complicated than Russian or Polish, so this is clearly dubious. The statement be removed or toned down until there's a source that can actually confirm it. Peter Isotalo 11:57, 28 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
      • You know, it's easy to miss, but this is cited in he body text of the article. The source is academic, too. I'm on my iPod now, but I'll take a look at the other complaints a bit later. Tezero (talk) 13:33, 28 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, filelakeshoe! So, if you haven't seen, someone's picked up the review and, while he likes it overall, he's made kind of an odd complaint: that there aren't enough sources numerically, not specifying that anything in particular needs further corroboration. Any ideas on how I might deal with this to his liking, while we wait for a native speaker to chime in on the way aspect is described? Tezero (talk) 16:18, 30 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I guess use more specific sources? I found an old copy of pravidla českého pravopisu lying around the house (which is the Czech Language Institute's authority on orthography) and just double checked the whole orthography section against it and added a few more cites from it. All I have time for tonight I think. To be honest I don't think we need to do this for the whole article :) – filelakeshoe (t / c) 18:36, 30 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Note on GA-status

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Noticed the GA. I don't feel I have time to do a full review, but I noticed that the phonology section is still based on Czech orthography, not IPA. This really needs to be fixed. Referring to phonemes with normal spelling is not appropriate. It should always be with proper linguistic notation so that it is unambiguous.

Peter Isotalo 11:59, 28 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Peter Isotalo, I believed I've fixed it. Is it better? Tezero (talk) 17:04, 28 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

By the way, I hope I'm not being annoying with all of this. I just want to be sure I know pretty well how to write language articles, as there are others I'd like to work on. Tezero (talk) 17:09, 28 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I suppose I'm somewhat of a stickler when it comes to phonetics... But I should stress you've done wonders with this article. There's a world of difference between that and this. Keep up the good work!
Peter Isotalo 18:41, 28 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, just a quick question on the phonology section: hard consonants may not be followed by y or ý, nor weak ones by i or í. Should it be otherwise?--Ludwigzhou (talk) 18:52, 28 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Apparently yes. I hadn't noticed. Tezero (talk) 22:07, 28 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Aspect

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The stuff about aspect in the verbs section needs attention from a learned native speaker and possibly better sources. I'm not sure it's as simple as all verbs coming in pairs with either prefix or suffix. One imperfective verb often has many perfective derivatives, for instance "dělat" has "udělat" and also "dodělat". One thing I can be sure of is that -ovat, -ávat verbs are imperfective, not perfective, so the longer infinitive ending is added to the perfective stem, e.g. koupit, prodat (perfective) become kupovat, prodávat (imperfective). Imperfective verbs can also have these stems added too, e.g. dělat → dělávat, as can perfective verbs with prefixes e.g. "vyhledávat", which has a different meaning to both "hledat" and "vyhledat". I'm not sure how best to explain it. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 08:54, 29 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@EmilJ:? – filelakeshoe (t / c) 09:03, 29 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm, I'm aware of this, but I'd forgotten about it and I don't believe it was mentioned in the source. I wrote it when I kept getting perfective and imperfective mixed up. Tezero (talk) 13:34, 29 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Since we got no response on here, I asked my girlfriend what she thought and she thinks the explanation is more or less accurate and that I was confused - hledat/vyhledat are not a pair but different verbs and vyhledat has the imperfective form vyhledávat. Adding a prefix to a verb can also change the meaning of the verb which is something we should perhaps find a source for.
You can make -ávat verbs from imperfective ones like "kupovávat" and they denote repeated actions. There is a source on the cs.wiki article [4] here which describes this using the scale "durative - iterative - frequentative" (using "jít - chodit - chodívat" as an example, all of which are imperfective). I have summed this up briefly using the same example. I removed the "list of suffixes" and replaced it with an example since it's a bit confusing - all of those were just standard infinitive endings and apart from the -vat ones can denote perfective verbs as well. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 08:29, 5 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'd like to add that perfective verbs only have the past and FUTURE tense, not present. For example: dělám (I am doing/making, I do/make), dodělám (I will finish/I will have finished). If this is cited from Naughton 2005, I suppose the source has it wrong. But I don't have the confidence to edit the article itself. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.101.65.95 (talk) 12:42, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hajičová

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Maunus, I've finally gotten around to looking at that citation issue and I've figured it out: it was an error in the "harv" citation to Hajičová regarding the author fields. I've fixed it now; to be clear, it was correctly referring to her rather than Stankiewicz. Tezero (talk) 04:05, 30 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The maps

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Could a legend be added for the upper map in that box (does those have a particular name?) on the right? It looks as though all of Europe speaks Czech as a majority... Cwbr77 (talk) 10:23, 21 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I'm also not sure what that's supposed to show. I'm even more unsure about the map below saying that Czech is spoken by a "significant minority" in the whole of Zaolzie... are there any figures on how many Cieszyn Silesian speakers there are left? The Template:Polish municipalities in the Czech Republic can only name three towns and a scattering of villages with 10% Poles in them. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 22:10, 26 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I have gone ahead and boldly removed the map, since the data is unsourced and questionable, this is a GA, and there were no comments forthcoming to my query on Commons here. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 08:00, 16 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

"Ona běžela"

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In Verb conjugation, "ona běžela could mean she ran, she has run or she had run.[92]" It could also mean (and it often means) "she was running". (I hesitate to simply add this meaning because it might require modifying the introductory phrase and/or the reference [-?])Svato (talk) 15:16, 12 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

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This article doesn't link to articles in other languages about the Czech language. Can somebody please fix this? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.179.23.154 (talk) 12:08, 11 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Why should it? This is the English Wikipedia. 68.19.5.207 (talk) 21:23, 31 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Czech phonology

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I've noticed some discrepancies between what the intro says about Czech vowels, and the information given in the section on Czech phonology:

  • In the introduction:
"Czech has a moderately-sized phoneme inventory, comprising five vowels (each short or long) and twenty-five consonants (divided into "hard", "neutral" and "soft" categories)."
  • In the Phonology section:
"Czech contains ten basic vowel phonemes, and three more found only in loanwords."

The latter is definitely more precise, as you cannot reduce the distinction merely to one of vowel length. Although the long /oː/ is a quantitative counterpart to the qualitatively similar, but short, /o/, it only appears in loanwords and onomatopoeia. Also, the difference between the short <i> and <í> is also one of quantity quality: /ɪ/ vs. /iː/. Hence, in reality, Czech has /a/, /aː/, /ɪ/, /iː/, /ɛ/, /eː/, /o/, /o͡u/, /u/, /uː/ as the basic vowels, and /a͡u/, /ɛ͡u/ and /oː/ as the peripheral vowels.

I'm not sure how to put all this in a simple way, easily comprehensible even to the non-experts. As a phonetician, I'm heavily biased. ;) --Pětušek 17:17, 7 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Nice catch. Actually not sure how that sentence in the lede went unnoticed because it isn't correct. I've reworded it to "10 monophthongs and 3 diphthongs" which I think is enough info for the lede. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 18:59, 7 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Great, thank you! Now, I've also noticed some problems in the Phonology section itself. Please, see below.

It says in the Phonology section that "[v]oiced consonants with unvoiced counterparts are unvoiced at the end of a word, or when they are followed by unvoiced consonants". Unfortunately, the issue is much more complex, since also unvoiced consonants are voiced when followed by voiced consonants with unvoiced counterparts (Standard Czech + mostly the Bohemian varieties), or when followed by voiced consonants in general (that is, including the sonorants; mostly in the Moravian varieties). Moreover, this phenomenon, known as voice assimilation, also takes place at word boundaries, so that <dost bylo> is pronounced as [dozdbɪlo]. In addition, whether a voiced obstruent devoices at the end of a word depends on whether it is followed by a pause (which is inherently voiceless, of course) or another voiced consonant, Because of that, defining the condition for devoicing as "at the end of a word" simply isn't sufficient. Compare the following consonant realizations, which make it (hopefully) rather clear that pauses behave very much like devoiced consonants indeed:

a. voicing within words:
  • zbít → [zbiːt] "to beat somebody up"
  • sbít → [zbiːt] "to nail/hammer something together"
b. devoicing within words:
  • stěžovat → [scɛʒovat] "to complain"
  • ztěžovat → [scɛʒovat] "to complicate"
c. voicing across word boundaries:
  • šest<PAUSE> → [ʃɛst] "six"
  • šest let → [ʃɛst lɛt] "six years"
  • šest vět → [ʃɛst vjɛt] "six sentences"
  • šest žen → [ʃɛzd ʒɛn] "six women"
  • šest řek → [ʃɛzd r̝ɛk] "six rivers"
d. devoicing across word boundaries:
  • sjezd<PAUSE> → [sjɛst] "congress, meeting etc."
  • sjezd lidí → [sjɛzd lɪɟiː] "congress of people"
  • sjezd vinařů → [sjɛzd vɪnar̝uː] "congress of wine growers"
  • sjezd žen → [sjɛzd ʒɛn] "congress of women"
  • sjezd Řeků → [sjɛzd r̝ɛkuː] "congress of Greeks"
  • sjezd potomků → [sjɛst potomkuː] "congress of descendants"

Also, notice the behaviour of /v/, which gets devoiced in relevant environments like an ordinary obstruent, but doesn't trigger voicing itself, thus behaving also like another sonorant (i.e. /m/, /l/ etc.); and the behaviour of /r̝/, which gets devoiced just like any other obstruent in relevant environments, but, unlike any other consonant, also devoices progressively, e.g.:

e. regressive devoicing within words:
  • nářky → [naːr̝̊kɪ] "lamentations"
f. regressive devoicing across word boundaries:
  • tvář<PAUSE> → [tvaːr̝̊] "face"
  • tvář člověka → [tvaːr̝̊ t͡ʃlovjɛka] "face of a person"
g. progressive devoicing within words:
  • přítel → [pr̝̊iːtɛl] "friend"

Having said all that, I realize we need to keep the Phonology section as brief as possible (this kind of information belongs to the standalone Czech Phonology article, I suppose), but, so far, I haven't been able to figure out how to reconcile informativeness, accuracy and shortness. Being a non-native speaker of English, I sometimes find it difficult to formulate things in a concise manner. And as a phonetician, I sometimes tend to use terminology that might be too opaque and discouraging to laypeople. I feel that's something that needs to be avoided to keep Wikipedia readable. :) --Pětušek 19:29, 7 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Czech phonology goes into more detail on the progressive/regressive voicing and the voicing and devoicing across word boundaries. Since a lot of this stuff varies between dialects I think we should mention it as little as possible here – the count of 10 monophthongs and 3 diphthongs is seldom valid in Moravia either, in North/East Moravian y can be further back than i, then some Silesian dialects don't distinguish long from short vowels at all... for simplicity's sake this should probably focus on the standard pronunciation outside the sections that focus on the other variants. I do think we should mention that ř can be both voiced and unvoiced, and also that /x/ and /ɦ/ make a pair (as this isn't mentioned and it's not entirely intuitive). Both of these factoids are sourceable from the IPA handbook.
Regarding the "at the end of a word" thing, I think the Czech phonology article approaches this more precisely: "Assimilation of voice is an important feature of Czech pronunciation. Voiced obstruents are, in certain circumstances, realized voiceless and vice versa. It is not represented in orthography, where more etymological principles are applied." I think if we can find a cite to support all this we could just lift this sentence into the main article. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 19:54, 7 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Orrrrr, we can just reword it to "at the end of a word before a pause" which is what the IPA handbook says about final devoicing. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 19:57, 7 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
OK, I made a bunch more edits to that section, using the IPA handbook as the source. It's definitely more in-depth than the original source which I don't have access to but seemed to only mention voice consonants devoicing and not vice versa. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 20:58, 7 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Great, the passage sounds much better now, thank you!
One more thing to consider though: since <ř> is described as "a sound somewhere between Czech's r and ž" and we do mention it becomes unvoiced in unvoiced environments, we might need to adjust that description a bit, because "a sound somewhere between Czech's r and š" is just as correct. Any ideas as to how to word that? Admittedly, it's not that important, but I have heard a lot of non-native speakers twistinɡ their poor tonɡues while trying to pronounce "přítel" as [pr̝iːtɛl] rather than [pr̝̊iːtɛl], achievinɡ somethinɡ like [b̥r̝iːtɛl] instead, at best. --Pětušek 21:58, 7 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Obecná / Hovorová

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Is hovorová čeština still a thing or has it been basically replaced by obecná čeština? Or are they just different ways of describing standard vernacular from different eras? This article prescribes the viewpoint that OČ is the standard vernacular in most of the country, but some sources seem to dismissively hand-wave it away. Komárek (2012) p117 dedicates a mere two sentences to it under the heading "tzv. obecná čeština":

The so-called "obecná čeština", which can be seen as an intersection of "hovorová čeština" and regional dialects, is a levelled interdialect which resulted from the dominant influence of the Central Bohemian dialect, and from which local dialectal features restricted to certain parts of Bohemia have been removed.

Meanwhile OČ enthusiast Milan Hrdlička frames it in the introduction to his book on OČ as simply being the common vernacular of today, as we do. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 21:31, 7 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I'm out of time now, but for the time being my short answer is that hovorová čeština is merely the spoken form of spisovná čeština, the codified, recommended and received standard taught at primary and secondary schools and used in public as well as most private media (with many buts). Obecná čeština is really an inter-dialect rather than a true dialect, since it's actually a (sub)set of features (mostly morphological, from the synchronic perspective) that are shared by many speakers of Czech in all of Bohemia and western parts of Moravia, but is considered substandard, displeasing even, in other parts of the country (again: with many buts). If I have some time tomorrow, I'll try to give you a more comprehensive answer. Anyway, the impression that OČ is the dominant vernacular is objectionable, because it really depends on the sociological domains and language functions. I, for one, commonly switch between OČ, SŠ/HČ and my own lect depending on whom I speak to, the context, environment, situation. More to share tomorrow! ;) --Pětušek 22:38, 7 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Ah okay so hovorová means "spoken written Czech" (I remember looking for sources on that during the GA push). Thanks. Interdialect is a trendy word in Czech dialectology at the moment and "obecná X" seems to be synonymous with it – the mush Central Moravian is becoming is referred to as "obecná hanáčtina" in this source for example, so there are a few vernaculars called "obecná something" but they don't together form one "main vernacular", they're all rooted in different phonological systems for a start. The Common Czech morphology is clearly linked to the Central Bohemian vowel shifts (ý > ej, é becoming a peripheral phoneme etc.) I'm going to at least add "in Bohemia" to that sentence. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 05:19, 8 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Well, the issue is a bit more complicated, and I'd really like to write more some time soon, but one minor point now at least: "spisovná" is not the same as "psaná". While the latter is derived from the verb "psát" (to write) and hence means "written" indeed, the former is derived from "spis" (a piece of writing, a written document). "Spisovná čeština" is (or should be) translated as "Literary Czech", hence "hovorová čeština" could be translated as "Spoken Literary Czech". Some people use "Colloquial Czech" instead, but that should be restricted to non-standard language. "Spoken Literary Czech" is the spoken "version" of "Literary Czech". I hope I haven't blurred the picture even more for you. :))--Pětušek 10:28, 8 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Map in infobox

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Firstly apologies to @Jirka.h23: for the revert, for some reason my browser was still showing the old map with the borderlands coloured in light - clearing cookies fixed it.

The map is still unsourced though, and I still question whether Czech is really a minority language in Zaolzie today. I couldn't find a map (probably because a map would be fairly unrevealing in this case) but Ethnologue only counts 33,600 L1 indigenous Polish speakers in Frýdek-Místek District, which has a population of 209,326 (2007). It's not the majority language in the whole district, though there may be individual villages where it is. And the sourced analysis of census data in Zaolzie says Czechs were the majority in 1991.

Would anyone object to me colouring the whole of Czechia in dark and leaving the light bits in Vojvodina and Croatia – and maybe adding the Czechs of Romania as well? – filelakeshoe (t / c) 10:09, 24 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

For what it's worth, I looked in Hannan (1996) and was merely reminded of how complicated the question is of whether the Polish spoken in Zaolzie nowadays is really "Polish" or if it can be seen as belonging to both Polish and Czech as per the classification of Belič, Kellner etc... but I suppose my question is rather whether a majority of people in that region actually speak ponaszymu nowadays or whether the north Moravian interdialect is more predominant. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 10:27, 24 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Filelakeshoe: Majority of population of Zaolzie nowadays clearly speaks Czech language. The Cieszyn Silesian dialect is spoken as a first language predominantly by Polish population there. People who identify themselves as Czechs, or even "Silesians" speak Czech. Many of them understand Cieszyn Silesian dialect but the dialect they speak is already closer to north Moravian dialect. Having said that, I believe the whole map should be in dark blue, as Czech language is clearly a majority language in Zaolzie (or districts of Karviná and Frýdek-Místek). - Darwinek (talk) 11:53, 24 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Alphabet

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Alphabet????? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.45.238.165 (talk) 21:09, 13 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Look here: Czech orthography, first paragraph. Jirka.h23 (talk) 12:59, 14 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Photo of "Prohibition signs written in Czech..."

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Please, can somebody change the photo of "Prohibition signs written in Czech, by entry #3 into the building of National Technical Library in Prague." In vain, I am trying to add the note, that the word "střežena" is misspelled on the photo. source

As a native speaker, I think it is a shame to have an english wikipedia page about czech language with grammar mistakes. Thank You. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.190.74.149 (talk) 01:16, 8 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the notice, the word "střežena" is really misspelled. I have changed the description at the photo and changed the article image. Jirka.h23 (talk) 08:37, 8 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Ř in Irish??

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Can someone substantiate the comment in the Phonology section that in Irish there is the raised alveolar trill? In the section, it notes that this can be found "in front of a slender vowel, as in the word Éire, the Irish name of Ireland", but neither the page for Ireland nor wiktionary's page for Éire nor the pages for Irish phonology nor mutations support this (instead, the pronunciation for Éire given in both articles reflects a palatalised alveolar tap). Thanks, -- Necro Shea mo 21:49, 1 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I've just removed it, since it was unsourced as well as being very suspect. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 13:18, 24 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Confusing sentence in "modern Czech" section

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The modern standard Czech language originates in standardization efforts of the 18th century.[1] By then the language had developed a literary tradition, and since then it has changed little; journals from that period have no substantial differences from modern standard Czech, and contemporary Czechs can understand them with little difficulty.[2] Changes include the morphological shift of í to ej and é to í (although é survives for some uses) and the merging of í and the former ejí.

The bit in bold is a little confusing. The í > ej vowel shift happened some time before the 18th century in Bohemian dialects, but the Kralice Bible held out against it, and probably because of this it never made it into the standard language. The way this is written makes it seem as if a) the í > ej and é > í vowel shifts are part of the standard language and b) they happened in the 18th century, both of which are false. And it is surely not a "morphological shift" but a phonological one. Does anyone have access to the source cited, Chloupek, Jan; Nekvapil, Jiří (1993). Studies in Functional Stylistics? – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 22:58, 25 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I found the source online, and checked this against it, and indeed, it was not discussing the modern standard language but a Havránek study of Baroque-era Czech (before the 18th century). It also doesnt quite say -í and -ejí "merged" (which begs the question "into which form") but that they were "mixed". I have removed the last sentence of the above segment. The í > ej vowel shift can definitely be covered in a more relevant place, preferably from a more in-depth source, I will check Komárek, Lamprecht-Slošar-Bauer and Koupil at home when I get a chance. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 08:20, 26 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

On tenses

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I just removed this because it is an oversimplified analogy to English and full of holes:

Although Czech's use of present and future tense is largely similar to that of English, the language uses past tense to represent the English present perfect and past perfect; ona běžela could mean she ran, she has run or she had run.[1]

  • Firstly whether English even has a "future tense" is highly debatable. English has a number of constructions that can be used to talk about the future, such as modal verbs ("will", "shall", "might"), periphrastic constructions ("be to", "be going to", "be about to"), the present continuous (be+ing), and the present simple, when the context is obvious. Czech by contrast does have a morphological future tense, so the claim that Czech's use of "future tense" is similar to English is flawed from the off.
  • Czech's use of future tense differs from English in context-dependent constructions such as conditional clauses - conjunctions like "když", "až" and "jestli" (when~if) require either a future tense verb or a perfective present tense verb (semantically future) following them to refer to a future event, unlike in English where a present tense verb is used. This is a pretty significant difference, IMHO. Another significant difference is the use of specifically perfective verbs in the present tense to talk about actions completing in the future.
  • Naughton p140 makes no comparison between Czech and English present and future so this is original research.
  • Czech does not always use the past tense to represent the English present perfect - there are cases where the imperfective present is used. For example "bydlím v Praze 10 let" means "I've lived/been living in Prague for 10 years", as this is an ongoing action upto the present. What Naughton actually says is "The Czech past tense may correspond to any of the past-tense forms of English, e.g. ‘he did’, ‘he was doing’, ‘he has done’, ‘he has been doing’ etc." This isn't quite the same as what was stated, and even that is in a chapter before he introduces aspect, which can make a couple of these distinctions, e.g. between "I wrote a book" and "I was writing a book" (see p149).

I think it would be a far better idea to describe Czech tense and aspect in its own terms rather than by way of dodgy comparisons to English. I have made some further clarifications. Hopefully the section on verb conjugation is a bit more accurate now. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 22:44, 17 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ Naughton 2005, p. 140

FAC?

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I would like to submit this article for FAC soon. Any comments would be appreciated. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 12:26, 2 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I've only had a quick look at the Grammar section. I think it could do with having less detail about the morphology (e.g. no need to give the declension of the numerals or to list the Czech names of the cases) and more content about the syntax (currently, there's just five short paragraphs and they're all only about word order). – Uanfala (talk) 12:10, 5 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

David Short ref

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Does anyone have access to Short, David (2009). "Czech and Slovak". In Bernard Comrie (ed.). The World's Major Languages (2nd ed.). Routledge. pp. 305–330? I am not sure about this bit in the sentence and clause structure section:

Enclitics (primarily auxiliary verbs and pronouns) appear in the second syntactic slot of a sentence, after the first stressed unit. The first slot must contain a subject or object, a main form of a verb, an adverb, or a conjunction

Saying it has to be a "subject or object" is a bit misleading, it can be anything with a noun or (non-clitic) pronoun in it that can be topicalised including e.g. an adjunct prepositional phrase. Take this example from this news article:

Koronavirová krize(Top) změnila svět(Foc) a s ním(Top) i způsoby placení(Foc) = "the Coronavirus crisis has changed the world, and with it also payment methods"

In the second clause "s ním" is in the first slot. That isnt really a subject or object. Curious what Short actually says. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 13:20, 2 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Filelakeshoe: Here's the relevant passage on p. 324:

The critical first slot may be occupied by the subject, object, an infinitive or other main form of a verb, an adverb or conjunction (but not the weak coordinating conjunctions a ‘and’, i ‘and even’ or ale ‘but’ ; this last constraint applies much less in Slovak). It may also be occupied by a subject pronoun, which will be there for emphasis, since subject pronouns are not normally required, person being adequately expressed in the verb, even in the past tense, thanks to the use of auxiliaries (unlike in Russian).

Note that this is not a statement about the first position in a clause in general, but only about the first constituent in a "host-enclitic" construction. Can you have an enclitic following an adjunct prepositional phrase? (Short has a sample clause Včera jste mi ji však nedal; can you replace včera with a prepositional phrase, e.g. před dvěma dny?) –Austronesier (talk) 14:28, 3 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks a lot! And yes you can, see e.g. "před dvěma dny jste se k otázce, zda budete jmenován premiérem, stavěl dost skepticky kvůli obavám ze stranických sekretariátů." That has "jste se" in the clitic slot. The "rule" as it's normally explained is just that clitics have to go in the second slot, and a/ale/i go in the "0th slot", so there needs to be something between them and the clitics (compare "přišel jsem domů a vařil jsem si guláš" vs. "přišel jsem domů, pak jsem si vařil guláš"). Think I just need to find a more indepth source for this. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 14:52, 3 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
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