The history of the Czech language: mini-lecture / Mini Hodinka Historie Ceskeho Jazyka

I don’t know how about you, but I personally don’t remember much about the history of the Czech language. All I remember from the school days is ” blah blah blah…Constantine and Methodius…blah blah blah…Jan Hus burnt at the stake…..blah,blah,blah…ding-dong!!!! (the school bell finally rings)”. Now that I am older, I find myself finding this information actually interesting and I retain some of the stuff too! Here is some light lecture on the history of our language that I found (I already cut out some ‘non-important’ parts so hopefully I am not going to bore you too much!).

CZ: Ja nevim jak vy, ale ja si z historie ceskeho jazyka moc nepamatuju. Jedine co se mi vybavuje je: “bla,bla,bla..Jan Hus upalen….bla,bla,bla….Ciril a Metodej….bla,bla,bla….crrrrrr!!!! (hodina je konecne u konce)”. Cim starsi ale jsem, tim vic me tyto veci zajimaji – a dokonce si i z toho co studuju neco zapamatuju!! Tady je velmi kratka a lehoucka lekce o tom, jak ten nas jazyk vlastne vznikl (doufam, ze vas neunudim k smrti):

Czech together with Slovak, Polish and Serbian languages is called the western group of Slavic languages. They are related to the languages of the east Slavic group such as Russian or the southern Slavic group like  Bulgarian, Serbian and Croatian. To be more specific, it belongs to the eastern division of Indo-European languages. How did it separate from the other Slavic languages? Most of the changes appeared already in the 10th century and continued well into the 16th century. Among the most obvious changes were:

• a –> e (dusa –> duse)
• g –> h (noga –> noha)
• uo –> u (duom –> dum)
• aj –> ej (vajce –> vejce)
• and so on…

By the end of the 15th century Czech had lost 2 Slavic past tenses (yes!) but made it up by creating even more declinations (o-oh..). What’s interesting is that the medieval Latin alphabet was used to write down the Czech names as well as the first commentaries until the 13the century. Once the Czech text became more sophisticated, a new, mixed writing system appeared (such as digraphs: ‘ch’) to mark down Czech sounds which had no equivalent in Latin alphabet. Jan Hus finally made an order in this ‘mess’ and created an official diacritical writing system, meaning that he placed diacritical marks (hacky,carky) over some Latin letters.

The Czech language has been influenced by many languages such as the Old Church Slavonic (introduced by Constantine and Methodius in the 9th century), Latin and German (the main language of the Hapsburg empire). Ever since the 14th century, Czech language has been producing a constant stream of various writings and books, except for the time when Czech became a province of the Hapsburg Empire. For those who like to know interesting facts, the first Czech  dictionary came out in the 14th century and the first Czech grammar book came out in 1533.

Are you asleep yet??

Source: http://www.czech-language.cz/overview/origin.html