How does Czech sound in your ears?

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Re: How does Czech sound in your ears?

Postby MillMaths » 2012-01-19, 11:32

You don't get my point, do you? I mean Czech stress is even simpler than the Polish one. Fuck Polish.

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Re: How does Czech sound in your ears?

Postby BezierCurve » 2012-01-19, 14:25

The stress in Polish is weaker, that's why it lacks the melody you can find in Czech.

And yes, if you fuck Polish, you might get somehow more distinctively stressed syllables.
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Re: How does Czech sound in your ears?

Postby Ludwig Whitby » 2012-01-19, 14:27

Czech is difficult to me because of the vowel length. I'm not used to unstressed long vowels.

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Re: How does Czech sound in your ears?

Postby LackOfFuel » 2012-01-19, 16:58

Rumpetroll wrote:Czech is difficult to me because of the vowel length. I'm not used to unstressed long vowels.

That is a trouble for me too.
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Re: How does Czech sound in your ears?

Postby mōdgethanc » 2012-01-19, 21:05

Sophie wrote:You don't get my point, do you?
I would get it if you had one. As it is, I don't see any convincing reason to believe that Czech is any easier than Polish or more aesthetically pleasing (which is a subjective feeling anyway).
I mean Czech stress is even simpler than the Polish one.
So what? Does that really make a big difference when learning it? At least it's not Russian stress!
Fuck Polish.
Why? It's a charming tongue.
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Re: How does Czech sound in your ears?

Postby TeneReef » 2012-01-21, 9:36

Which Czech: formal written (based on 17th century usage) or informal (21th century)?
In diglossic languages we should specify the variant. :)

I would consider it a Scandinavian-sounding Slavic language because of the funny melody it has,
although (I think) it has no tonemes/pitch. So, this melody is just for show. :mrgreen: :roll:
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Re: How does Czech sound in your ears?

Postby TeneReef » 2012-01-21, 9:46

Aurelia wrote:how language is structured tells me a great deal about the nation who speaks it :)!

:para: Then you don't want to get my opinion on diglossic languages. :P
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Re: How does Czech sound in your ears?

Postby Aurelia » 2012-01-22, 19:12

TeneReef wrote:
Aurelia wrote:how language is structured tells me a great deal about the nation who speaks it :)!

:para: Then you don't want to get my opinion on diglossic languages. :P


Hahaha, yeah those ones are pretty... um... let's say interesting ;)!
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Re: How does Czech sound in your ears?

Postby Parasztember » 2012-05-21, 12:03

The czech language often forced hungarians laughing , especially if it sounds in Pop/Rock songs, and Hollywood films. It's not an irony, only an involuntary thing :) I don't know the cause of this phenomena.
For the hungarian ears the czech is too tough, due to the frequent use of consonants, it sounds strange but unique. Honesty...

But I'm curious, how sounds the hungarian language for the czechish people?

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Re: How does Czech sound in your ears?

Postby cal » 2012-05-30, 7:04

Parasztember wrote:But I'm curious, how sounds the hungarian language for the czechish people?


Well... let's put it like this: it's all Greek to most of us :roll: :D
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Re: How does Czech sound in your ears?

Postby TeneReef » 2012-05-30, 18:08

Ludwig Whitby wrote:Czech is difficult to me because of the vowel length. I'm not used to unstressed long vowels.


Standard Croatian and Serbian have zanaglasne duljine. :mrgreen:
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Re: How does Czech sound in your ears?

Postby Ludwig Whitby » 2012-05-30, 22:59

TeneReef wrote:
Ludwig Whitby wrote:Czech is difficult to me because of the vowel length. I'm not used to unstressed long vowels.


Standard Croatian and Serbian have zanaglasne duljine. :mrgreen:
mjȅsēc

Yeap, but I don't pronounce them. They are rarely heard in Belgrade, they are more common in western Serbia.

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Re: How does Czech sound in your ears?

Postby johnklepac » 2012-12-06, 15:17

It's always sounded to me like one of the most robotic of the Slavic languages - less gruff and alive than the ones spoken farther east. The vowel stress, as mentioned before, is very uniform and the grammar seems pretty average among Slavic languages, like it was designed from the top, while there are also a lot of borrowed words. I do enjoy it.

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Re: How does Czech sound in your ears?

Postby Mulder-21 » 2012-12-20, 9:22

I know that I already posted on this subject before, but well, I'm a few years smarter and hopefully also wiser, so here goes:

I'm still biased to Slovak, but here's what I think:

Czech is very hard (as opposed to soft). I mean -e is supposed to, you'd think, soften the preceeding consonant (as in Slovak, but Slovak has a buttload of exceptions). Granted Czech has a LOT of ě's but you could argue that they most often represent /je/ and not /ʲe/. But OK, Czech also has palatalised its velars after -e: v Praze (SK: v Prahe) etc, also 'a is consistently changed to -e: SK, PL: ulica <> CZ: ulice. So well...

A feature of Czech is that you can have several long vowels in sequence. This is a no-no in Standard Slovak for instance, compare: otevÍrÁnÍ vs. otvÁranIE. (long vowels/diphthong are capitalised). Slovak is win here IMHO. Maybe this is what people find robotic about Czech, not sure.

Plural genitive -ů. I still prefer -ov (either -ow of -off, doesn't matter which).

Also, final -i/-y as a quasi-schwa sound. This just sounds weird. :)

But OK, most of what I've written I've written as a comparison to Slovak, which will probably always be my favourite Slavic language.

I don't know if I wrote everything I had to say about Czech. And well, though it might have features that I don't like, per se, it's still a great language. I just still prefer its smaller neighbour to the E/SE. :)
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Re: How does Czech sound in your ears?

Postby エヴァルダス » 2013-04-13, 10:53

Checz is and sounds pretty much Slavic to me. But I’ve just discovered that it’s phonology is more or less identical to the one of a very different language – Latvian:

1) vowels are almost identical in both languages. Latvian has [i] instead of [ɪ] (they would pronounce „byli“ [ˈbili] instead of [ˈbɪlɪ]), and Checz doesn’t have an [e] sound. Latvian [æ] is more open than Czech [ɛ]. That’s about all the differences;

2) according to http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... _chart.png , there is no qualitative vowel length in Czech, as well as in Latvian. Short vowels (with the exception of [ɪ]) are identical to their long counterparts, except that the latter are longer;

3) consonants are identical in both languages. No palatalization occurs in both languages. Differences are very small. Latvian has no [r̝] (ř) sound, while Czech has no [ʎ] (marked as /ļ/ in Latvian);

4) in both languages stress is in the first syllable.

Dialects differ more that these two compared side by side!

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Re: How does Czech sound in your ears?

Postby mōdgethanc » 2013-04-13, 17:11

johnklepac wrote:It's always sounded to me like one of the most robotic of the Slavic languages - less gruff and alive than the ones spoken farther east. The vowel stress, as mentioned before, is very uniform and the grammar seems pretty average among Slavic languages, like it was designed from the top, while there are also a lot of borrowed words. I do enjoy it.
The word robot is a borrowing from Czech, in fact.

I think it sounds kind of strange due to a) all the syllable consonants b) the postalveolar r-caron sound and c) the unvaried initial stress. The concept of a Slavic tongue with vowel length is strange to me too. I have to wonder if it's an innovation or an original feature.

I'm far more familiar with Russian and Polish, which don't sound anything like Czech, so that's probably why it seems so strange to me.
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Re: How does Czech sound in your ears?

Postby TeneReef » 2013-04-13, 18:24

Pan (sir) sounds like bread. :mrgreen:
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Re: How does Czech sound in your ears?

Postby הענט » 2013-04-13, 19:35

エヴァルダス wrote:Checz is and sounds pretty much Slavic to me. But I’ve just discovered that it’s phonology is more or less identical to the one of a very different language – Latvian:

1) vowels are almost identical in both languages. Latvian has [i] instead of [ɪ] (they would pronounce „byli“ [ˈbili] instead of [ˈbɪlɪ]), and Checz doesn’t have an [e] sound. Latvian [æ] is more open than Czech [ɛ]. That’s about all the differences;

2) according to http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... _chart.png , there is no qualitative vowel length in Czech, as well as in Latvian. Short vowels (with the exception of [ɪ]) are identical to their long counterparts, except that the latter are longer;

3) consonants are identical in both languages. No palatalization occurs in both languages. Differences are very small. Latvian has no [r̝] (ř) sound, while Czech has no [ʎ] (marked as /ļ/ in Latvian);

4) in both languages stress is in the first syllable.

Dialects differ more that these two compared side by side!


I've noticed that too. :) Latvian and Hungarian are not a big deal for me to pronounce. I guess Lithuanian is a little bit more distant than Latvian in terms of phonology. :hmm:

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Re: How does Czech sound in your ears?

Postby הענט » 2013-04-13, 19:37

Parasztember wrote:The czech language often forced hungarians laughing , especially if it sounds in Pop/Rock songs, and Hollywood films. It's not an irony, only an involuntary thing :) I don't know the cause of this phenomena.
For the hungarian ears the czech is too tough, due to the frequent use of consonants, it sounds strange but unique. Honesty...

But I'm curious, how sounds the hungarian language for the czechish people?


Strange, but unique. That's exactly what I think of Hungarian. :)

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Re: How does Czech sound in your ears?

Postby エヴァルダス » 2013-04-13, 22:25

I guess Lithuanian is a little bit more distant than Latvian in terms of phonology.


Yes, and that’s precicely because from this perspective Lithuanian is much more Slavic than both Czech and Latvian :D


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