Question about Czech
Question about Czech
One of my sources - I think it's The Concise Encyclopedia of Languages - mentions that the Czech umlauts of about a millennium ago gave the language its "characteristic and very distinctive sound". Can those with substantial knowledge of the spoken Slavic languages say if this "distinctive sound" amounts to more than just a higher frequency of front vowels?
Self-referential signatures are for people too boring to come up with more interesting alternatives.
Re: Question about Czech
Note that the vowel distribution frequency can indeed make a language sounds different.
IPA of my name: [xʷtɛ̀k]
Favourite morphology: Polysynthetic, Ablaut
Favourite character archetype: Shounen hero
Favourite morphology: Polysynthetic, Ablaut
Favourite character archetype: Shounen hero
Re: Question about Czech
Note that the vowel distribution frequency can indeed make a language sounds different.
IPA of my name: [xʷtɛ̀k]
Favourite morphology: Polysynthetic, Ablaut
Favourite character archetype: Shounen hero
Favourite morphology: Polysynthetic, Ablaut
Favourite character archetype: Shounen hero
Re: Question about Czech
They mean vowel shifts, not diacritics.
(In college, I told one of my linguistics professors that I wanted to learn a Slavic language for comparative purposes and I was leaning towards Czech. His reaction was “But the vowels in Czech are a disaster!”)
Re: Question about Czech
But which vowel shifts? ů itself is the result of a vowel shift that's comparable to umlaut (but the vowel it represents isn't a front vowel).
EDIT: Okay, that's bad phrasing.
Er...anyway, my point is I was just wondering what specific changes alice meant. 
Re: Question about Czech
Without knowing Alice’s source, I can’t be sure, but I imagine they mean specifically the shifts of *a, *o, *u, and *e to /e/, /e/, /i/, and /i/ [via /je/] after palatalised consonants. The raising of *e: and *o: via /je/ and /wo/ would be a different phenomenon.
Re: Question about Czech
Linguoboy has already explained what Umlaut usually refers to in the context of Czech, but just to add a few examples.
One place you can see the shift well is in feminine nouns originally ending in -a, with accusative in -u. In Czech this class has split into two paradigms, depending on the preceding consonant. Comparing with Slovak, which did not undergo this vowel shift:
There is a similar split in the accusative/genitive of animate masculine nouns, which originally had -a:
You can also see the result of these shifts in the verbal paradigms, e.g. berou (no umlaut) but mají (umlaut):
And some examples where you can see these shifts in the root:
(<tě> is just how Czech represents /cɛ/ - <ťe> is not used)
You can see that the change affected /u/, /uː/ and /a/. /aː/ was affected too in some dialects (> /ie/ > /iː/), but this has not generally made it into the standard language, e.g. třást "shake" in the standard, tříst in some varieties. There's a map with some isoglosses here: http://nase-rec.ujc.cas.cz/archiv.php?lang=en&art=4171. It's quite old, though, and I'm not sure whether the dialectal forms discussed there still exist.
As for /o/, I'm not sure. The only potential example I can think of is the vocative case of feminine nouns, where we see see -o in nouns ending in -a, but -e in nouns where a palatalised consonant preceeded (duše etc.), i.e. it is identical to the nominative.
The vowel shift did not happen (at least sometimes!) when a non-palatalised consonant followed, resulting in alternations like vzal "he took" - vzěli "they took" in Old Czech. These have generally undergone analogical levelling in the modern language: the standard has vzal - vzali, while some varieties levelled to vzel - vzeli (also covered by the isogloss map linked earlier).
We also see analogical levelling in 1st person singular verb forms where -u shifted to -i. For example, píši "I write" is still usual in formal writing, but the spoken language mostly has the levelled form píšu. With verbs in -ovat the umlauted 1s forms -uji are still widely used, with the levelled forms in -uju quite colloquial. You'll hear both děkuji and děkuju for "thank you", for example.
Czech does look like an outlier in the Slavic languages if you look just at this sound shift, but honestly I don't agree that this contributes much to the distinctive sound of the language. To me the overall sound impression comes more from e.g.:
- Phonemic vowel length in both stressed and unstressed syllables.
- Weak initial stress, no vowel reduction in unstressed syllables.
- Development of a /c ɟ ɲ r̝/ from tʲ dʲ nʲ rʲ, and otherwise loss of the contrast between palatalised and non-palatalised consonants.
Though of course this is quite a subjective question.
One place you can see the shift well is in feminine nouns originally ending in -a, with accusative in -u. In Czech this class has split into two paradigms, depending on the preceding consonant. Comparing with Slovak, which did not undergo this vowel shift:
| Czech | Slovak | Czech | Slovak | Czech | Slovak | |
| Nom. | duše "soul" | duša | ulice "street" | ulica | žena "woman" | žena |
| Acc. | duši | dušu | ulici | ulicu | ženu | ženu |
There is a similar split in the accusative/genitive of animate masculine nouns, which originally had -a:
| Czech | Slovak | Czech | Slovak | Czech | Slovak | |
| Nom. | muž "man" | muž | král "king" | kráľ | slon "elephant" | slon |
| Acc. | muže | muža | krále | kráľa | slona | slona |
You can also see the result of these shifts in the verbal paradigms, e.g. berou (no umlaut) but mají (umlaut):
| Czech | Slovak |
| berou "they carry" | berú |
| mají "they have" | majú |
And some examples where you can see these shifts in the root:
| Czech | Slovak |
| klíč "key" | kľúč |
| jih "south" | juh |
| lidé "people" | ľudia |
| led "ice" | ľad |
| těžký "heavy" | ťažký |
You can see that the change affected /u/, /uː/ and /a/. /aː/ was affected too in some dialects (> /ie/ > /iː/), but this has not generally made it into the standard language, e.g. třást "shake" in the standard, tříst in some varieties. There's a map with some isoglosses here: http://nase-rec.ujc.cas.cz/archiv.php?lang=en&art=4171. It's quite old, though, and I'm not sure whether the dialectal forms discussed there still exist.
As for /o/, I'm not sure. The only potential example I can think of is the vocative case of feminine nouns, where we see see -o in nouns ending in -a, but -e in nouns where a palatalised consonant preceeded (duše etc.), i.e. it is identical to the nominative.
The vowel shift did not happen (at least sometimes!) when a non-palatalised consonant followed, resulting in alternations like vzal "he took" - vzěli "they took" in Old Czech. These have generally undergone analogical levelling in the modern language: the standard has vzal - vzali, while some varieties levelled to vzel - vzeli (also covered by the isogloss map linked earlier).
We also see analogical levelling in 1st person singular verb forms where -u shifted to -i. For example, píši "I write" is still usual in formal writing, but the spoken language mostly has the levelled form píšu. With verbs in -ovat the umlauted 1s forms -uji are still widely used, with the levelled forms in -uju quite colloquial. You'll hear both děkuji and děkuju for "thank you", for example.
Czech does look like an outlier in the Slavic languages if you look just at this sound shift, but honestly I don't agree that this contributes much to the distinctive sound of the language. To me the overall sound impression comes more from e.g.:
- Phonemic vowel length in both stressed and unstressed syllables.
- Weak initial stress, no vowel reduction in unstressed syllables.
- Development of a /c ɟ ɲ r̝/ from tʲ dʲ nʲ rʲ, and otherwise loss of the contrast between palatalised and non-palatalised consonants.
Though of course this is quite a subjective question.
Re: Question about Czech
Thank you so much for your detailed answer! 