# Talk:Czech language

The modern standard Czech language originates in standardization efforts of the 18th century.[1] By then the language had developed a literary tradition, and since then it has changed little; journals from that period have no substantial differences from modern standard Czech, and contemporary Czechs can understand them with little difficulty.[2] Changes include the morphological shift of í to ej and é to í (although é survives for some uses) and the merging of í and the former ejí.
The bit in bold is a little confusing. The í > ej vowel shift happened some time before the 18th century in Bohemian dialects, but the Kralice Bible held out against it, and probably because of this it never made it into the standard language. The way this is written makes it seem as if a) the í > ej and é > í vowel shifts are part of the standard language and b) they happened in the 18th century, both of which are false. And it is surely not a "morphological shift" but a phonological one. Does anyone have access to the source cited, Chloupek, Jan; Nekvapil, Jiří (1993). Studies in Functional Stylistics? – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 22:58, 25 July 2019 (UTC)

I found the source online, and checked this against it, and indeed, it was not discussing the modern standard language but a Havránek study of Baroque-era Czech (before the 18th century). It also doesnt quite say -í and -ejí "merged" (which begs the question "into which form") but that they were "mixed". I have removed the last sentence of the above segment. The í > ej vowel shift can definitely be covered in a more relevant place, preferably from a more in-depth source, I will check Komárek, Lamprecht-Slošar-Bauer and Koupil at home when I get a chance. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 08:20, 26 July 2019 (UTC)

I just removed this because it is an oversimplified analogy to English and full of holes:

Although Czech's use of present and future tense is largely similar to that of English, the language uses past tense to represent the English present perfect and past perfect; ona běžela could mean she ran, she has run or she had run.
Firstly whether English even has a "future tense" is highly debatable. English has a number of constructions that can be used to talk about the future, such as modal verbs ("will", "shall", "might"), periphrastic constructions ("be to", "be going to", "be about to"), the present continuous (be+ing), and the present simple, when the context is obvious. Czech by contrast does have a morphological future tense, so the claim that Czech's use of "future tense" is similar to English is flawed from the off.
Czech's use of future tense differs from English in context-dependent constructions such as conditional clauses - conjunctions like "když", "až" and "jestli" (when~if) require either a future tense verb or a perfective present tense verb (semantically future) following them to refer to a future event, unlike in English where a present tense verb is used. This is a pretty significant difference, IMHO. Another significant difference is the use of specifically perfective verbs in the present tense to talk about actions completing in the future.
Naughton p140 makes no comparison between Czech and English present and future so this is original research.
Czech does not always use the past tense to represent the English present perfect - there are cases where the imperfective present is used. For example "bydlím v Praze 10 let" means "I've lived/been living in Prague for 10 years", as this is an ongoing action upto the present. What Naughton actually says is "The Czech past tense may correspond to any of the past-tense forms of English, e.g. ‘he did’, ‘he was doing’, ‘he has done’, ‘he has been doing’ etc." This isn't quite the same as what was stated, and even that is in a chapter before he introduces aspect, which can make a couple of these distinctions, e.g. between "I wrote a book" and "I was writing a book" (see p149).
I think it would be a far better idea to describe Czech tense and aspect in its own terms rather than by way of dodgy comparisons to English. I have made some further clarifications. Hopefully the section on verb conjugation is a bit more accurate now. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 22:44, 17 August 2019 (UTC)

I would like to submit this article for FAC soon. Any comments would be appreciated. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 12:26, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

I've only had a quick look at the Grammar section. I think it could do with having less detail about the morphology (e.g. no need to give the declension of the numerals or to list the Czech names of the cases) and more content about the syntax (currently, there's just five short paragraphs and they're all only about word order). – Uanfala (talk) 12:10, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

Does anyone have access to Short, David (2009). "Czech and Slovak". In Bernard Comrie (ed.). The World's Major Languages (2nd ed.). Routledge. pp. 305–330? I am not sure about this bit in the sentence and clause structure section:

Enclitics (primarily auxiliary verbs and pronouns) appear in the second syntactic slot of a sentence, after the first stressed unit. The first slot must contain a subject or object, a main form of a verb, an adverb, or a conjunction
Saying it has to be a "subject or object" is a bit misleading, it can be anything with a noun or (non-clitic) pronoun in it that can be topicalised including e.g. an adjunct prepositional phrase. Take this example from this news article:

Koronavirová krize(Top) změnila svět(Foc) a s ním(Top) i způsoby placení(Foc) = "the Coronavirus crisis has changed the world, and with it also payment methods"
In the second clause "s ním" is in the first slot. That isnt really a subject or object. Curious what Short actually says. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 13:20, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

@Filelakeshoe: Here's the relevant passage on p. 324:
The critical first slot may be occupied by the subject, object, an infinitive or other main form of a verb, an adverb or conjunction (but not the weak coordinating conjunctions a ‘and’, i ‘and even’ or ale ‘but’ ; this last constraint applies much less in Slovak). It may also be occupied by a subject pronoun, which will be there for emphasis, since subject pronouns are not normally required, person being adequately expressed in the verb, even in the past tense, thanks to the use of auxiliaries (unlike in Russian).
Note that this is not a statement about the first position in a clause in general, but only about the first constituent in a "host-enclitic" construction. Can you have an enclitic following an adjunct prepositional phrase? (Short has a sample clause Včera jste mi ji však nedal; can you replace včera with a prepositional phrase, e.g. před dvěma dny?)  –Austronesier (talk) 14:28, 3 November 2021 (UTC)
Thanks a lot! And yes you can, see e.g. "před dvěma dny jste se k otázce, zda budete jmenován premiérem, stavěl dost skepticky kvůli obavám ze stranických sekretariátů." That has "jste se" in the clitic slot. The "rule" as it's normally explained is just that clitics have to go in the second slot, and a/ale/i go in the "0th slot", so there needs to be something between them and the clitics (compare "přišel jsem domů a vařil jsem si guláš" vs. "přišel jsem domů, pak jsem si vařil guláš"). Think I just need to find a more indepth source for this. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 14:52, 3 November 2021 (UTC)