30 July 2024
I’ve been away from blogging for a while, so to dip back into it here’s a handy reference if you ever find yourself working with Czech terms or names.
For indexing, there are two things to know about the Czech alphabet. First, the alphabet for the purpose of sorting is as follows (note that the consonant cluster ch is treated as its own letter when it comes to alphabetization and comes after h):
a
b
c
č
d
e
f
g
h
ch
i
j
k
l
m
n
o
p
q
r
ř
s
š
t
u
v
w
x
y
z
ž
The letter x is an import from foreign words to the Czech alphabet.
Czech has a further twelve letters that are used in spelling words, but they are not considered separate letters when it comes to alphabetization. They are alphabetized with their equivalents.
á
ď
é
ě
í
ň
ó
ť
ú
ů
ý
Thus, in an index, úvod (introduction) falls between uvažovat (to think) and uznávat (to recognize), but šaty (clothes) comes after syn (son).
Like Polish, Czech uses diacritics to adapt the Latin alphabet to the Czech language. The inverted circumflex (č, ě, ř, ň, š, ž) is a haček and renders sounds as follows: č is like the ch in chain; ě is like ye in yes; ř is like rg in bourgeois; ň is like the ni in onion; š is like sh in ship; ž is like s in treasure. The acute accent found over á (a like in father), é (ai like in pair), í (ee like in bee), ó (oo like in door), ú (oo like in fool), and ý (ee like in bee)is a čarka. The letters ď and ť also have čarky; they are not the letters d and t followed by an apostrophe. These letters produce the sounds similar to the du in duel (for ď) and the tu in tune (for ť). The Unicode for ď is 010F and that for ť is 0165. What looks like a circle or small ring above ů is known as a kroužek and produces the sound oo like in fool.
The sound equivalents I’ve given for both Polish and Czech are approximations. The English language does not have many of the phonemes found in these Slavic languages and what’s presented here is meant to give you a general idea, not a true guide to pronunciation.
When it comes to the plurals, both Polish and Czech as inflected languages observe agreement in case, gender, and number between the adjective and noun, along with distinguishing between animate and inanimate nouns. The formation of the plural is also governed by whether the word in the nominative case has a soft stem or a hard stem. All language texts on Polish and Czech (but not travel phrase books) introduce the learner to these concepts at the beginner level, and multiple sites online provide rubrics. When encountering Czech or Polish terms in an otherwise anglophone text, those terms are likely to be in the nominative case. If you’re in doubt, you can plug the term into Wiktionary, which usually does a good job of recognizing the case, gender, and number of declined nouns and adjectives (as well as the conjugations of verbs).