Concept

Czech language

Overview

Czech ( CHEK; endonym: čeština [ˈtʃɛʃcɪna] ), historically known as Bohemian ( boh-HEE-mee-ən, bə-; Latin: lingua Bohemica), is a West Slavic language of the Czech–Slovak group, written in Latin script. Spoken by over 12 million people including second-language speakers, it serves as the official language of the Czech Republic. Czech is closely related to Slovak, to the point of high mutual intelligibility, as well as to Polish to a lesser degree. Czech is a fusional language with a rich system of morphology and relatively flexible word order. Its vocabulary has been extensively influenced by Latin and German.

The Czech–Slovak group developed within West Slavic in the high medieval period, and the standardization of Czech and Slovak within the Czech–Slovak dialect continuum emerged in the early modern period. In the later 18th to mid-19th century, the modern written standard became codified in the context of the Czech National Revival. The most widely spoken non-standard variety, known as Common Czech, is based on the vernacular of Prague, but is now spoken as an interdialect throughout most of Bohemia. The Moravian dialects spoken in Moravia and Czech Silesia are considerably more varied than the dialects of Bohemia.

Czech has a moderately-sized phoneme inventory, comprising ten monophthongs, three diphthongs and 25 consonants (divided into "hard", "neutral" and "soft" categories). Words may contain complicated consonant clusters or lack vowels altogether. Czech has a raised alveolar trill, which is known to occur as a phoneme in only a few other languages, represented by the grapheme ř.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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But put =Schillers Gedichte= (Schiller’s Poems). 18. _The Comma._—In German, commas must invariably be put before =daſs= and before relative clauses (beginning with =der=, =die=, =das=, =welcher=, =welche=, =welches=, =womit=, =wodurch=, =woran=, =woraus=, &c. &c.). This is frequently forgotten by English compositors. 19. §.—This mark (in English, ‘section’) is called in German ‘Paragraph’.
Oxford University Press, Rules for compositors and readers at the University Press, Oxford
States what Czech language is.
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This process of composition is sometimes found in its incipient stage—a stage in which the component words are temporarily united to signify some unnamed object, and do not (from lack of frequent use) permanently cohere. But in the majority of inferior languages, the process of “agglutination,” as it is called, has gone far enough to produce considerable stability in the compound words: there is a manifest…
Herbert Spencer, First Principles
States what Czech language is.
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First of all, languages are by this simplification rendered more prolix, several words having become necessary to express what could have been expressed by a single word before. Thus the words, _Dei_ and, _Deo_, in the Latin, sufficiently show, without any addition, what relation, the object signified is understood to stand in to the objects expressed by the other words in the sentence.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
States what Czech language is.
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Philosophers who discussed Czech language

Related ideas

Opposing perspectives

Grammatical gender

Place in the tradition

Part of Alphabetical order.

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