Czech (or Bohemian) is an Indo-European language from the West Slavic branch, related closely to Slovak and somewhat less so to Polish, Wendish/Sorbian (still heard around Saxony and Brandenburg), Silesian (Slonsk) and another rarity called Kashubian. Its written heritage dates back to the 1400s and it uses the Roman alphabet with various modifying accent marks which the more modern browsers are able to display.* Czech is an inflected language employing seven noun cases, the consequence of which is that word order in a sentence is far more flexible than it is in English and that the definite article and certain pronouns and prepositions can be dispensed with. There are about 12 million speakers. Like other Slavic languages, this one can get pretty serious with its blended consonants. A classic Czech tongue-twister, for example, is the vowel-starved Strč prst skrz krk, meaning “Stick a finger in the throat.” And then there's also Třista třicet tři stříbrných stříkaček stříkalo přes třista třicet tři stříbrných střech (“333 silver fire hoses sprayed over 333 silver roofs”). Though nowadays they follow the Greco-Roman model like nearly everyone else, in the course of a national revival several generations ago the Czechs developed their own traditional terminology — not at all tongue-twisting — for the solar system as you'll see below. |
