Czech Language

The “Big Book of Lists” ranks the Czech language as the hardest human language. Certainly, that is a believable claim having studied it with reasonable intensity for two years. Yet, reading anything more than basic advertising and the large print on newspapers is all but impossible. A bit of history, Jan Hus, a Czech hero in many ways, wrote the modern Czech language system in the 15th century in fourteen volumes. He used this system to translate the bible, much to the dismay of the Papacy. In turn, the papacy excommunicated him and later waged a war to kill him. Jan was not an angel. He ran a group of religious reformists from a city outside of Prague, called Tabor. In Jan’s time, as the name implies Tabor was more of a camp than city. To make a long story short, Jan and his Tabor boys would make the most fanatic English Lager Lout seem a church mouse. The Taborites were known to burn churches with the bishop and priests inside and routinely steal from church coffers. That was the state of the art in fifteenth century church and government reform in Europe. Maybe, it was the best way to change things, but that is a decision for the history books. A thug’s life seemed to appeal to the Taborites for almost fifty years after Jan himself had been killed by the church. It may be a little unfair to judge Jan, who only burned and pillaged during his free time. A guy has to have hobbies when his life’s work is translating the bible and penning the systematic approach to the Czech language. Until I started studying Czech, it did not seem sensible that a language was not understandable with a good dictionary. American English is complicated, but decipherable with a dictionary. Most words are possible to find in a linguist’s dictionary and with some practice many of the idioms are understandable. Czech on the other hand, has a math problem and cuteness working against it. Engineering school taught me that a math problem is solvable, that is the point of a math problem. Systematic cuteness is more difficult. If Czech language is a math problem, then I just alienated most Czech linguists in a single sentence. If the linguists are not already breaking out their markers and poster board for their protest they are just refusing to read this book. They are refusing because I said that the Czech language is a math problem, and they in general do not like math. Czech has four genders, seven cases, three tenses (past, present and future), and two verb forms (perfective and imperfective). They actually do use them all in nearly every day discussions. Czech language uses two male genders (animate, inanimate), female and neuter. There are rules that help with knowing the gender of a given word. Usually the rules work, but they work they have exceptions. It becomes particularly important to use the correct genders because the rest of the grammar may have a different meaning if the genders of the nouns are wrong. In English, it is not what you say, but how you say it. Czech has to be careful because the case system makes word order less important. Free word order sentences make it really hard to read for English speakers. Academically, we can get passed a different linguistic system. German language has similar issues; it is known to have impossibly long sentences with half of the verbs in the clauses and the other half at the end of the sentence. As we said in High School, “Coach! Let me play!” Czech is the “run-on sentence” king. Sentence length is not determined by the complete statement of information. A simple rule that no sentence should be longer than four lines, they can be shorter but why? In Czech, all you have to do is add a comma, and you get a whole new sentence, there is no need to put a period at the end, reading a newspaper can become complicated when the world’s longest run on sentence must be deciphered, yet the sentence may actually be a whole paragraph.” So we have come to the math problem part of the discussion. If you want to say something will happen in the indeterminate, near future they have the perfective and imperfective system. The perfective and imperfective system roughly doubles the number of verbs. This system generates verb pairs for each contextual verb, such as; to give dát / davát, to handle vyřidit / vyrizovat, or to return vrácet / vrátit. Add to that, there are three tenses each with its own rules. English uses fifty-two prepositions with each verb. Czech has roughly 104 verbs with the same non-sensical system as English. After you memorize 104 ways to cut something, you realize there are several meanings for “to cut.” Each verb has its own perfective and imperfective verb pair. If that all seems to make sense, each of these verb families have different conjugations for nouns with different genders. Gender-specific conjugation is not uncommon in Slavic languages. What is truly alien to English-speakers is the idea of declension and palettization. Palettization is the practice of changing the spelling of the word to make it easier to say. If they are making it easier to say, why do they still have words like prst, Krč, and rozzařit? So giving something to your wife, manželka, is not “k manželkě”, but “k manželce”. It gets more complicated with their beloved dogs, psy. If you are talking about one dog it is pes. If you have to talk about dogs as a topic, it is psů. However, if you are looking for your lost dog, you are looking for your pesiček. Just imagine what happens if you want to look for your “girl dog.” Like all Slavic languages, Czech also uses cases with numbers. Even something as universal as the number “1” actually is declined three times for the gender of the noun of which you have one. If you would like one sandwich, you want jeden sendvič. Today, you are pretty hungry, so you do not get one menu, you order jedna denní menu. Still, if that was not enough one feather, is jedno pero. Realizing that Slavic numbers are based on a hand does not make things easier. There is a case for none, a different case for one, likewise for two – four and a final case for more than four. They do not only change the endings, sometimes it is much worse. The number 100 in the dictionary is sto. Understanding that the endings move, you could guess that 200 might be dvě ste, 300 as tři sta, but probably guessing 500 as pět set would be out of your league. There are few exceptions to this, but it becomes complicated if you have words with ambiguous gender. The impossible of Czech language is that they do not normally use the dictionary word for something. In a restaurant, a free seat would absolutely be a volno místo. Beware that it will not be uncommon to look for a volna místička, which also has a different gender and a different declension. The declension of words is not a “cute” thing. The 225lb (100kg) man in the office who is almost 6’6” (2m) tall will ask if you received his fax, faxička. Or he might say that the girl in the street had cute breasts, pekne prsičky. No there is no such thing in Czech as harassment, it is almost considered rude to not say something to her. It does not make sense that they would change fax to faxička or prsa to prsičky. There is a system to the declension, just be aware that it is not bad to have a krasna prdelka, but understand that a small cable, kabel is not a kabelka, purse. Czech is not impossible. It is however particularly difficult. A reasonable understanding of conversant Czech feels overwhelming even after two years. After almost two years of study, we have only just finished the basic case system. They say that at this pace we will be almost conversational in three or four years. At least that is something to look forward to; pity we still will not be able to read a newspaper.