Talk:Czech phonology

message: Could someone please explain this in more detail? For example, are the z and h in nezhasni voiced or voiceless and is this so according to some "rule"? --Espoo (talk) 18:09, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: According to this rule (reggressive assimilation), this group is voiced, because h is voiced, so the whole group (zh) is voiced. --Pajast (talk) 13:51, 24 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: So is the group sn also voiced? Is it the bad recording here or is Lucia Popp singing all or some of these as voiceless consonants? --Espoo (talk) 18:51, 27 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Continue reading below the table. Sonorants (/m,n,ɲ,r,l,j/) and /v,r̝/ do not trigger regressive assimilation, so "sn" is still /sn/. — Emil J. 15:40, 23 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  consonant assimilation 

message: What is the exact IPA value of Czech <l>. It clearly sounds different than Polish or French <l>. May it be velarized?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.21.38.149 (talk) 20:00, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: No, it should not be velarized in the standard variety. It's true, however, that especially the western varieties (especially Common Czech) do tend to velarize it, and the situation can be even more complex in some estern Moravian/Silesian varieties, where the velarization is conditioned positionally. Hence, orthoepically, it should be the normal alveolar lateral /l/, with the velarized variant /ɫ/ occurinɡ reɡionally and sometimes individually.Pětušek 10:58, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: It 'should'. 'Orthoepically'. So very 19th century. Modern linguistics describes languages as actually spoken. Everybody I've heard speak Czech velarises it, at least in Western Czechia. Nobody speaks with a French or German l. That's a very striking difference between Czech and for example Polish. If your 'pronunciation standard' isn't actually spoken by anyone, or by the overwhelming majority of educated middle-class people, then the problem is with the standard that is outdated, not with the people. (Also, the difference between Standard and Common Czech concerns the grammar and the phonemic content of the morphemes you use, not specific phonetic realisations.)--62.73.69.121 (talk) 19:45, 12 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title: Velarized lateral in Czech

message: One Confused user keeps reverting the transcription to one which distinguishes the height of the u-like vowels [ʊ,uː], instead of [u,uː]. The last time he finally gave something resembling an argument in his edit summary: "rv. It's sourced, so se the source." Apart from the fact that he kan't spel, this apparently tells us to look in the references mentioned in this article as well as :cs:Fonologie češtiny for support of his theory. Well, unlike him, I did. It cannot hurt to know what the sources say on the matter, so I looked up all I could find in a library, and these are the results. Note first that none of the sources use IPA regularly, they employ the traditional Czech transcription based on letters of the Czech alphabet, so short vowels are denoted by [a,e,i,o,u], and long vowels by the same letter with a colon or an acute accent [a:,á]. Translation is mine.
*M. Krčmová, Úvod do fonetiky a fonologie pro bohemisty. These are lecture notes (skripta) of the University of Ostrava, my library does not hold it. However, I checked other work by the same author:
:*M. Krčmová, Fonetika a fonologie. Zvuková stavba současné češtiny, Masarykova Universita, Brno, 1996, . On pp. 91–92, she writes: Long vowels usually have formant structure very similar to the structure of a short vowel; the largest difference is for [í], where formants are raised by up to 10%.
:*M. Krčmová also maintains on-line lecture notes for her course on phonetics: . Remarkably, she has a nice IPA chart for Czech there, which, as you can see, promotes IPA [u,uː] for Czech u-like vowels.
*Z. Šiška, Fonetika a fonologie. These are lecture notes of the Palacký University in Olomouc, my library does not hold it.
*T. Duběda, Jazyky a jejich zvuky. Univerzálie a typologie ve fonetice a fonologii. Currently on loan, I'll check it later.
*P. Karlík, M. Nekula, J. Pleskalová (eds.), Encyklopedický slovník češtiny. On pp. 492–493, they propose the following transcription of Czech vowels in IPA (italics are theirs): [a,o,u,ɛ,ɪ,a:,ɛ:,i:,o:,u:,ou,au,eu] or [ou̯,au̯,eu̯].
*P. Karlík, M. Nekula, Z. Rusínová (eds.), Příruční mluvnice češtiny. Only has a list of Czech vowel phonemes accompanied by a simple table (with no differences between short and long vowels shown other than length) on pp. 28–29, there is no discussion of their phonetic realization.
*F. Čermák, Jazyk a jazykověda. Currently on loan, I'll check it later. However, this is a textbook of general linguistics with no emphasis on either phonetics or the Czech language; there's unlikely to be anything useful there wrt our problem. There's nothing relevant there, as I suspected. Updated: 09:40, 24 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  u/ʊ 

message: "Consonant merging is perceived as careless at word boundaries, e.g. pojď sem (come here) realized as . It is necessary to pronounce all phonemes clearly and separately: ."
But then, I have never heard a native speaker say "". To me the normal realisation is at best , if not  (though I find [c] and [t] quite difficult to distinguish in fast speech). It may not be super duper Czech but in reality, some kind of merging usually occurs.. - filelakeshoe 18:48, 26 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: That's a good point, indeed. I think Pojď sem. is a poor choice, because its pronunciation as , though not orthoepical is pretty lexicalized in everyday spoken Czech. We need to find a better example (I'm unable to come up with one now, though).--Pětušek 09:24, 20 September 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Pojď sem

message: This book (the section 0.3, page 2) claims that the Bohemian dialect, which is the base of the standard language, features something like the English Great Vowel Shift, with long vowels shifted upward of diphthongized: ý > ej, é > ý/í, ú > ou, ó > ú.
Is it true? Shouldn't it be mentioned in the article? Hellerick (talk) 12:00, 26 September 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: This is mentioned in Czech language#Varieties, but this article probably could use some information on historical development. The way that is worded is misleading, however, as the ý > ej and é > ý/í vowel shifts are not reflected in modern Standard Czech (see the "Diglossia" section of that introduction) – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 13:57, 26 September 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Vowel shift? 

message: This wording would imply not just a velarisation in the sense of secondary articulation as in a normal dark L ([ɫ]), but something far more extreme - 'velar-isation' in the (unusual, but etymologically possible) sense of a transition to a primary velar place of articulation - i.e. 'L-vocalisation' to something like [ɰ], if not [w]. For this to begin to occur among some speakers, if indeed it does occur, you would first need to have had a realisation as a normal 'dark' [ɫ]  (and not just a [l]) for quite some time previously (which is indeed the case in my opinion). I have the feeling that whoever wrote this didn't understand that 'velarisation of L' refers to a transition of [l] to [ɫ] and not to [ɰ], or somehow conflated the two. 62.73.69.121 (talk) 22:45, 12 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  'a velarized pronunciation without a firm tongue tip contact is not unusual.'?