More fun with Czech [#projectPrague blog post]

[lproven]

I have now, apparently, surpassed A1 level. Which is good, but it's taken 5 years of on-and-off studying. My 5th anniversary here was at the end of April. I am finding this hard to believe.

But I am still grappling with the language.

I have a very vague hope that It is possible that my Czech will have substantially improved before it's time to

Comments

[history_monk]

I have no sensible advice, being far less talented with languages than you, but I have a question: How do Czech-speakers react to you making mistakes?

A lot of people I meet and some I work with have fairly limited English, but that's immediately obvious, and I switch to trying to figure out what they mean and help them. Do you get that reaction in Czech?

[lproven]

Oh, yes, definitely. People are very tolerant and supportive. But there are multiple problems, such as that with declensions carrying so much info, Czech word order is very free. So I can ask for glass in my beer instead of beer in my glass, to put it ludicrously simply. Without the right declensions, it can be a bit like I am uttering an alphabetically sorted list of word roots and they can't reliably guess what I want something with, without, instead of, or must have.

So ask for food without meat and there's a risk I am asking for only food _with_ meat, for instance.

Everyone tries to be helpful but it only goes so far.

[history_monk]

So Czech is much less tolerant of misuse than English? I can see why you worry.

[lproven]

It's not that, exactly

[ffutures]

There's some good Czech SF films, I suspect you're already watching them but if not I strongly recommend this one

Tomorrow I'll Get Up And Scald Myself With Tea
https://youtu.be/tVBPNfKfgNo

Any translation you do yourself will probably be at least as good as the subtitles...

[lproven]

I've heard of that... I must see it.

I confess I fell asleep in Ikari XB-1. :-(

[lproven]

I would have to bet against myself. :-(

[waistcoatmark]

I had a greek colleague ask em the other day
- Mark, is it automated daily release, or daily automated release?
- Well it depends on which aspect is more important
- Well they're both important.
- In that case it doesn't matter
- What do you mean? I need the order!
- There isn't an order
- There is! I spent 6 months studying it at school
- There isn't.
- OK. Well which is correct: "a red big ball", or "a big red ball"?
- Oh my god. You're right!
Apparently there are seven levels of hierarchy in English adjectives. And I've got a very well trained neural net that has incorporated this fact. But if I want to know what the hierarchy is, I just have to throw suggestions at my net and see which sounds right. No idea what the formal rules are.

[lproven]

Oh yes indeed.

https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/english-grammar/adjective-order

Also, how do you know what nouns are countable or not?

Do you have the informations I need? May I give you two advices?

Is it Prague Castle or the Prague Castle? The Czech Republic or are you going to Czech Republic? Why?

Which is correct: I lost my keys? I have lost my keys? Is there a difference?
How does it compare to:
I drove to work? I have driven to work?

What's the difference between "someone" and "anyone"? "Beyond" versus "behind"?

[watervole]

What always puzzles me is how all these complex endings evolved in the first place.

Why have genders? If you must have genders, why have different endings for everything associated with them?

It makes a bit of sense to have cases acting differently, but why the need for gender changes to words near them?

[lproven]

I read an elegant argument for this once.

It does reduce ambiguity a lot.

Like the "cat sat on the mat" example I gave to John above. If I said "pes seděl na rohoži" -- the dog sat on the mat -- then that's clear.

But if in English, I said "this is a dog, that's a carpet, and it sat on it" -- then you don't know who is sitting on what.

But in Czech, if I said "to je pes, a to je rohož, a to seděl na tom" then it must be the dog that is sitting, because the verb form is for a male sitter, and only the dog is masculine, the carpet is feminine -- so with just as little information specified, the Czech is less ambiguous.

The other thing to consider is that "masculine" and "feminine" mean as little as "top", "bottom" and "strange" do about quarks. The word "gender" shares a root with "kind". It doesn't mean that things are in some way male or female; it's just a handy label to slap on the different _kinds_ of nouns.

Any help?

[watervole]

I'm not convinced. English is a positional language. We'd just say something like "This is a carpet, and that dog sat on it."

Why would an early language need to reduce ambiguity? If you're starting simple, then why not:"This is a dog. This is a carpet. The dog sat on the carpet"

Or just have the subject modified to clarify without needing gender.

eg. the dog (add ending for subject) sat on the carpet (add ending for object). (I think Latin does something like that, but it was many many years ago so I could be wrong)

[lproven]

I don't think we would. The canonical example English sentence is "the cat sat on the mat". It is trivial to reduce that to "it sat on the mat" and then "it sat on it", and then, information has been lost