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The Czech language developed at the close of the 1st millennium from common West Slavic. Until the early 20th century, it was known as Bohemian.
Among the innovations in common West Slavic is the palatalization of velar ch > š (vьšь 'all'), while s (vьsь) developed in the East and South Slavic dialects.
Within West Slavic, Czech and Slovak separated from Polish around the 10th to 12th centuries. Some other changes took place during roughly the 10th century:
The disappearance of the odd yers strengthened the phonological contrast of palatalized (softened) and unpalatalized consonants, and resulted in alterations of epenthetic e and ∅ (null-phoneme). The contrast of the vowel quantity (length) was also strengthened. The depalatalization of consonants preceding e and ä took place later, thus the frequency of occurrence of palatalized consonants was lowered, but it strengthened the palatalization contrast at the same time. The change of ’ä > ě and ä > a took place at the end of the 12th century.
The vowels were front (ä, e, i, ě) and back (a, o, u), and the front ones had their back variants (allophones), and vice versa.[ clarification needed ] The consonants were divided into hard (b, p, v, m, t, d, r, l, n, c, z, s, k, g, ch) and soft – palatal or palatalized (t’, d’, ř, l’, n’, c’, s’, z’, č, š, ž, j, ň). This division was cardinal for the later development.
The spirantisation of Slavic /g/ to /h/ is an areal feature shared by Ukrainian (and some southern Russian dialects), Belarusian, Slovak, Czech, Sorbian (but not Polish) and minority of Slovene dialects. This innovation appears to have travelled from east to west, and is sometimes attributed to contact with Scytho-Sarmatian. [1] It is approximately dated to the 12th century in Slovak, the 12th to 13th century in Czech and the 14th century in Upper Sorbian. [2]
In the nominal declension, the traditional division according to the word-stem ending was progressively replaced by the gender principle (masculine, feminine and neuter) There were also three grammatical numbers: singular, dual and plural.
The dual is also applied in verb conjugations. The past is expressed by aorist, imperfect, perfect and pluperfect. The future tense is not fixed yet; the present tense is often used instead. The contrast of perfective and imperfective aspects is not fully developed yet, there are also biaspectual and no-aspectual verbs. The Proto-Slavic supine was used after verbs of motion, but it was replaced by the infinitive. However, the contemporary infinitive ending -t formally continues the supine.
The earliest written records of Czech date to the 12th to 13th century, in the form of personal names, glosses and short notes.
The oldest known complete Czech sentence is a note on the foundation charter of the Litoměřice chapter at the beginning of the 13th century:
The earliest texts were written in primitive orthography , which used the letters of the Latin alphabet without any diacritics, resulting in ambiguities, such as in the letter c representing the k /k/, c /ts/ and č /tʃ/ phonemes. Later during the 13th century, the digraph orthography begins to appear, although not systematically. Combinations of letters (digraphs) are used for recording Czech sounds, e.g. rs for ř.
Large changes take place in Czech phonology in the 12th and 13th centuries. Front and back variants of vowels are removed, e.g. ’ä > ě (ie) and ’a > ě (v’a̋ce > viece 'more', p’äkný > pěkný 'nice'). In the morphology, these changes deepened the differences between hard and soft noun types (sedláka 'farmer (gen.)' ↔ oráčě 'ploughman (gen.)'; města 'towns' ↔ mor’ě 'seas'; žena 'woman' ↔ dušě 'soul') as well as verbs (volati 'to call' ↔ sázěti 'to plant out'). The hard syllabic l changed to lu (Chlmec > Chlumec, dĺgý > dlúhý 'long'), as opposite to soft l’. The change of g to [ ɣ ], and later to [ ɦ ], had been in progress since the 12th century. Later assibilation of palatalized alveolars (t’ > c’, d’ > dz’ and r’ > rs’) occurred. However, c’ and dz’ disappeared later, but the change of r’ > rs’ > ř became permanent.
In the 14th century, Czech began to penetrate various literary styles. Official documents in Czech exist at the end of the century. The digraph orthography is applied. The older digraph orthography: ch = ch; chz = č; cz = c; g = j; rs, rz = ř; s = ž or š; w = v; v = u; zz = s; z = z; ie, ye = ě; the graphemes i and y are interchangeable. The vowel length is not usually denoted, doubled letters are used rarely. Obligatory regulations did not exist. This is why the system was not always applied precisely. After 1340, the later digraph orthography was applied: ch = ch; cz = c or č; g = j; rs, rz = ř; s = s or š; ss = s or š; w = v; v = u; z = z or ž, syllable-final y = j; ie, ye = ě. The graphemes i and y remain interchangeable. The punctuation mark is sometimes used in various shapes. Its function is to denote pauses.
The changes of ’u > i (kl’úč > klíč 'key') and ’o > ě (koňóm > koniem '(to) horses') took place. The so-called main historical depalatalization, initiated in the 13th century, was finished. Palatalized (softened) consonants either merged with their hard counterparts or became palatal (ď, ť, ň). The depalatalization did not temporarily concern hard and soft l, which merged to one middle l later at the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries. In this context, the phoneme ě [ʲe] disappeared. The short ě either changed to e or was dissociated to j + e (pěna [pjena] 'foam') before labial consonants in the pronunciation. The long ě was diphthongized to ie (chtieti 'to want', čieše 'goblet', piesek 'sand'). At the same time, the long ó was diphthongized to uo (sól > suol 'salt'). In pronunciation, regressive assimilation of voice was enforced (with the exception of h, ř and v). The voicedness became the main contrastive feature of consonants after the disappearance of palatalization. The original pronunciation of v was probably bilabial (as preserved in some Eastern-Bohemian dialects in syllable-final positions: diwnej 'peculiar', stowka 'a hundred'), but in the 14th century, the articulation was adapted to the unvoiced labiodental f. Prothetic v- has been added to all words beginning with o- (voko instead of oko 'eye') in the Bohemian dialects since this period.
In morphology, the future tense of imperfective verbs was fixed. The type budu volati 'I will call' became preferred to other types (chc’u volati 'I want to call', jmám volati 'I have to call', and budu volal 'I will have called'). The contrastive feature of imperfectiveness was also stabilized. The perfectivization function of prefixes and the imperfectivization function of suffixes are applied. As a consequence of this, aorist and imperfect start disappearing little by little and are replaced by the perfect (now called preterite, since it became the only past tense in Czech). The periphrastic passive voice is formed.
The period of the 15th century from the beginning of Jan Hus's preaching activity to the beginning of Czech humanism. The number of literary language users enlarges. Czech fully penetrates the administration.
Around 1406, a reform of the orthography was suggested in De orthographia bohemica , a work attributed to Jan Hus – the so-called diacritic orthography. For recording of soft consonants, digraphs are replaced by a dot above letters. The acute is used to denote the vowel length. The digraph ch and the grapheme w are preserved. The interchangeability of the graphemes i and y is cancelled. The suggestion is a work of an individual person, therefore this graphic system was accepted slowly, the digraph orthography was still in use.
As a consequence of the loss of palatalization, the pronunciation of y and i merged. This change resulted in the diphthongization of ý > ej in Common Czech (the widespread Bohemian interdialect). There are also some other changes in this period: the diphthongization of ú > ou (written au, the pronunciation was probably different than today), the monophthongization of ie > í (miera > míra 'measure') and uo > ú. The diphthong uo was sometimes recorded as o in the form of a ring above the letter u, which resulted in the grapheme ů (kuoň > kůň). The ring has been regarded as a diacritic mark denoting the length since the change in pronunciation.
The contrast of animateness in masculine inflection is not still fully set, as it is not yet applied to animals (vidím pána 'I see a lord'; vidím pes 'I see a dog'). Aorist and imperfect have disappeared from literary styles before the end of the 15th century.
The period of the mature literary language from the 16th to the beginning of the 17th century. The orthography in written texts is not still unified, digraphs are used predominantly in various forms. After the invention of book-printing, the so-called Brethren orthography stabilized in printed documents. The Bible of Kralice (1579–1593), the first complete Czech translation of the Bible from the original languages by the Unity of the Brethren, became the pattern of the literary Czech language. The orthography was predominantly diacritic; the dot in soft consonants was replaced by the caron which was used in č, ď, ň, ř, ť, ž. The letter š was mostly written in the final positions in words only, the digraph ʃʃ was written in the middle. The grapheme ě became used in the contemporary way. Vowel length was denoted by the acute accent, except for ů developed from original uo. The long í was doubled ii for technical reasons; later it was denoted as ij, and finally as j. Pronounced [j] was recorded as g or y, pronounced [g] was sometimes recorded by the grapheme ǧ. The double w was preserved, the simple v denoted the word-initial u. The diphthong ou was denoted as au. The hard y was always written after c, s, z (cyzý 'strange'). The complicated syntax, influenced by Latin texts, required some improvement of the punctuation. However, the comma was used according to pauses in pronunciation, not the syntax. The full stop, the colon, the question mark and the exclamation mark are used. The first grammars are published for typographers' purposes.
In the pronunciation, the change of ý > ej was established, but it occurred in lesser prestige style text only. The diphthongization of ú > ou was also stabilized (but au still remained in graphics). In initial positions, it was used in lesser prestige or specialized styles only. Written mě [mje] starts to be pronounced as [mɲe]. The change of tautosyllabic aj > ej (daj > dej 'give (2. sg. imperative)', vajce > vejce 'egg') took place, but it was not applied in heterosyllabic aj (dají 'they will give', vajec 'egg (gen. pl.)').
In morphology, the differentiation of animate and inanimate masculines was completed (vidím psa rather than the earlier vidím pes).
The period from the second half of the 17th century to the second third of the 18th century was marked by confiscations and emigration of the Czech intelligentsia after the Battle of White Mountain. The function of the literary language was limited; it left the scientific field first, the discerning literature later, and the administration finally. Under the rule of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II, who also reigned as king of Bohemia, the use of Czech was discouraged due to its association with Protestantism, and relegated to a spoken peasant tongue. [3] However, puppeteers continued to use Czech for public marionette shows, and popular legend has it that this preserved the Czech language from extinction at home. [4]
Meanwhile, prestigious literary styles were cultivated by Czech expatriates abroad. The zenith and, simultaneously, the end of the florescence of prestigious literary styles are represented by the works of Jan Amos Komenský. The changes in the phonology and the morphology of the literary language ended in the previous period. Only the spoken language continued its development in the country. As a consequence of strong isolation, the differences between dialects were deepened. Especially, the Moravian and Silesian dialects developed divergently from Common Czech.
Printed documents used the same orthography as in the previous period. Only the two kinds of l are not differentiated any more. The semicolon occurs as a punctuation mark for better and clear organization of excessive and complicated complex sentences. Digraphs with irregular elements of diacritics are still used in hand-written texts.
The first ideas of the National Revival were in so-called defences of the Czech language. The most likely first such work is Dissertatio apologetica pro lingua Slavonica praecipue Bohemica ("The defence of the Slavic language, of Czech in particular"), written in Latin by Bohuslav Balbín.
The period from the 1780s to the 1840s. The abolition of serfdom in 1781 (by Joseph II) caused migration of country inhabitants to towns. It enabled the implementation of the ideas of the Czech national awakeners for the renewal of the Czech language. However, the people's language and literary genres of the previous period were strange to the enlightened intelligentsia. The literary language of the end of the 16th century and of Komenský’s work became the starting point for the new codification of literary Czech. Of the various attempts at codification, Josef Dobrovský’s grammar was ultimately generally accepted. Purists' attempts to cleanse the language of germanisms (both real and fictitious) had been occurring by that time. The publication of Josef Jungmann’s five-part Czech-German Dictionary (1830–1835) contributed to the renewal of Czech vocabulary. Thanks to the enthusiasm of Czech scientists, Czech scientific terminology was created.
Step by step, the orthography was liberated from the relics of the Brethren orthography. According to the etymology, si, zi or sy, zy came to be written, cy was replaced by ci. Antiqua was introduced instead of fractura in printing, and it led to the removal of the digraph ʃʃ and its replacement by the letter š. The long í replaced j, and j replaced g (gegj > její 'hers'). In the 1840s, the double w was replaced by v and ou replaced the traditional au. Thus, the orthography became close to its contemporary appearance. According to the German model, the punctuation leaves the pause principle and respects the syntax.
The artistic literature often resorted to archaisms and did not respect the natural development of the spoken language. This was due to attempts to reach the prestige literal styles.
Literary Czech has not been an exclusive matter of the intellectual classes since the 1840s. Journalism was developing and artistic works got closer to the spoken language, especially in syntax. In 1902, Jan Gebauer published the first Rules of Czech Orthography, which also contained an overview of the morphology. These rules still preferred older forms in doublets.
During the 20th century, elements of the spoken language (of Common Czech especially) penetrated literary Czech. The orthography of foreign words was changed to reflect their German pronunciation, especially writing z instead of s and marking the vowel length (e.g. gymnasium > gymnázium 'grammar school'). Social changes after World War II (1945) led to gradual diminishing of differences between dialects. Since the second half of the 20th century, Common Czech elements have also been spreading to regions previously unaffected, as a consequence of the media's influence.
Czech, historically also known as Bohemian, is a West Slavic language of the Czech–Slovak group, written in Latin script. Spoken by over 10 million people, 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.
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek διακριτικός, from διακρίνω. The word diacritic is a noun, though it is sometimes used in an attributive sense, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritics, such as the acute ⟨á⟩, grave ⟨à⟩, and circumflex ⟨â⟩, are often called accents. Diacritics may appear above or below a letter or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters.
Polish is a West Slavic language of the Lechitic group within the Indo-European language family written in the Latin script. It is spoken primarily in Poland and serves as the native language of the Poles. In addition to being the official language of Poland, it is also used by the Polish diaspora. There are over 50 million Polish speakers around the world. It ranks as the sixth most-spoken among languages of the European Union, and second most spoken slavic language. Polish is subdivided into regional dialects and maintains strict T–V distinction pronouns, honorifics, and various forms of formalities when addressing individuals.
Y, or y, is the 25th and penultimate letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. According to some authorities, it is the sixth vowel letter of the English alphabet. In the English writing system, it mostly represents a vowel and seldom a consonant, and in other orthographies it may represent a vowel or a consonant. Its name in English is wye, plural wyes.
A caron is a diacritic mark (◌̌) commonly placed over certain letters in the orthography of some languages to indicate a change of the related letter's pronunciation.
A phonemic orthography is an orthography in which the graphemes correspond to the language's phonemes. Natural languages rarely have perfectly phonemic orthographies; a high degree of grapheme–phoneme correspondence can be expected in orthographies based on alphabetic writing systems, but they differ in how complete this correspondence is. English orthography, for example, is alphabetic but highly nonphonemic; it was once mostly phonemic during the Middle English stage, when the modern spellings originated, but spoken English changed rapidly while the orthography was much more stable, resulting in the modern nonphonemic situation. On the contrary the Albanian, Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian/Montenegrin, Romanian, Italian, Turkish, Spanish, Finnish, Czech, Latvian, Esperanto, Korean and Swahili orthographic systems come much closer to being consistent phonemic representations.
A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used in the orthography of a language to write either a single phoneme, or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined.
The first Slovak orthography was proposed by Anton Bernolák (1762–1813) in his Dissertatio philologico-critica de litteris Slavorum, used in the six-volume Slovak-Czech-Latin-German-Hungarian Dictionary (1825–1927) and used primarily by Slovak Catholics.
The soft sign is a letter in the Cyrillic script that is used in various Slavic languages. In Old Church Slavonic, it represented a short or reduced front vowel. However, over time, the specific vowel sound it denoted was largely eliminated and merged with other vowel sounds.
Aljamiado or Aljamía texts are manuscripts that use the Arabic script for transcribing European languages, especially Romance languages such as Mozarabic, Aragonese, Portuguese, Spanish or Ladino.
Waw is the sixth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician wāw 𐤅, Aramaic waw 𐡅, Hebrew vav ו, Syriac waw ܘ and Arabic wāw و.
Polish orthography is the system of writing the Polish language. The language is written using the Polish alphabet, which derives from the Latin alphabet, but includes some additional letters with diacritics. The orthography is mostly phonetic, or rather phonemic—the written letters correspond in a consistent manner to the sounds, or rather the phonemes, of spoken Polish. For detailed information about the system of phonemes, see Polish phonology.
The Portuguese language began to be used regularly in documents and poetry around the 12th century. Unlike neighboring Romance languages that adopted formal orthographies by the 18th century, the Portuguese language did not have a uniform spelling standard until the 20th century. The formation of the Portuguese Republic in 1911 was motivation for the establishment of orthographic reform in Portugal and its overseas territories and colonies. Brazil would adopt an orthographic standard based on, but not identical to, the Portuguese standard a few decades later.
Portuguese orthography is based on the Latin alphabet and makes use of the acute accent, the circumflex accent, the grave accent, the tilde, and the cedilla to denote stress, vowel height, nasalization, and other sound changes. The diaeresis was abolished by the last Orthography Agreement. Accented letters and digraphs are not counted as separate characters for collation purposes.
Czech orthography is a system of rules for proper formal writing (orthography) in Czech. The earliest form of separate Latin script specifically designed to suit Czech was devised by Czech theologian and church reformist Jan Hus, the namesake of the Hussite movement, in one of his seminal works, De orthographia bohemica.
The modern Latvian orthography is based on Latin script adapted to phonetic principles, following the pronunciation of the language. The standard alphabet consists of 33 letters – 22 unmodified Latin letters and 11 modified by diacritics. It was developed by the Knowledge Commission of the Riga Latvian Association in 1908, and was approved the same year by the orthography commission under the leadership of Kārlis Mīlenbahs and Jānis Endzelīns. It was introduced by law from 1920 to 1922 in the Republic of Latvia.
Proto-Slavic is the unattested, reconstructed proto-language of all Slavic languages. It represents Slavic speech approximately from the 2nd millennium BC through the 6th century AD. As with most other proto-languages, no attested writings have been found; scholars have reconstructed the language by applying the comparative method to all the attested Slavic languages and by taking into account other Indo-European languages.
Podlachian language is an East Slavic literary microlanguage based on the East Slavic dialects spoken by inhabitants of the southern part of Podlachian Province in Poland between the Narew (north) and Bug (south) rivers. The native speakers of these dialects usually refer to them by the adverbial term po-svojomu. The unequivocal academic classification of the po-svojomu dialects has been disputed for many years among linguists as well as activists of ethnic minorities in Podlachia, who classify them as either Belarusian dialects with Ukrainian traits or Ukrainian dialects.
Silesian orthography consists of many systems for writing the Silesian language. the current de facto standard is the Ślabikŏrzowy szrajbōnek or ślabikŏrz for short, largely but not entirely displacing Steuerowy szrajbůnek. These systems use variants of the Silesian alphabet, which derives from the Latin alphabet, but includes some additional letters with diacritics. The orthography is mostly phonetic, or rather phonemic—the written letters correspond in a consistent manner to the phonemes of spoken Silesian.
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