The Czechs in a Nutshell

To the Jesuits, the Habsburg Emperor’s storm troops, a book written in Czech (and not in Latin or German) was automatically treated as a demonstration of heresy. Thus, in the years that followed the Czechs’ defeat, an entire literature was practically destroyed. A certain monk, named Koniáš, was said to have set a record when he, single-handedly, burned 30,000 books authored by Czechs in their own language.

The germanisation of the Czechs in the aftermath of the debacle in 1620 went so far that by the end of the seventeenth century, the Czech language had been more or less eradicated in the state administration, in literature, in schools, at Prague’s university and among the upper classes. The language, which for centuries had produced literary works of sometimes amazing quality, was reduced to a means of communication among (often illiterate) peasants.

“Any person who wanted to be considered as well-bred and educated, was clinging with body and soul to German,” the literary historian Jan Máchal writes. “And those who still cared about Czech were regarded as fools or even lunatics.”

Things improved when the somewhat enlightened Josef II (see: Jews) replaced his mother Maria Theresia on the imperial throne in Vienna in 1780. Czech teachers were allowed to teach in their mother tongue, and a chair in Czech language and literature was established at the university in Prague. These rather modest reforms triggered what later became known as České národní obrození (the Czech National Revival).

Obviously, the revival of the language played a crucial role. Here, two persons have earned themselves immortality.

In 1809, Josef Dobrovský (1753-1829), a theologian by training, published an Ausführliches Lehrgebäude der böhmische Sprache (Comprehensive manual for the Bohemian language). Based on both old Slavonic and the language of Czech folk songs and tales, the stringent scientist Dobrovský formed the laws of modern Czech.

As Jan Hus had done four centuries earlier, Dobrovský also started to throw out loanwords of German origin, replacing them either with revived Czech words, or by creating completely new ones. So, while the rest of the Slavonic peoples go to the teater or borrow books in a biblioteka, the Czechs are still going to the divadlo (“lookery”) and visiting the knihovna (“bookery”).

The second revivalist, Josef Jungmann (1773-1847) used Dobrovský’s work as a stepping-stone for further reforms. While the first regarded Czech mainly as a subject of scientific study, the latter struggled to put the grammatical laws into practice as a living language.

To achieve this, Jungmann first published a History of Czech Literature, then his master work, a Czech-German dictionary in five volumes (where he introduced Czech transformations of foreign loan-words with a creativity that even shocked good old Dobrovský), and finally a brilliant translation of Milton’s Paradise Lost. When Jungmann put down his pencil, the foundations of a modern Czech literary language were laid.

Now, let’s have a look at contemporary Czech.

Unfortunately for foreigners, no other Slavonic language has more cases (seven) or a more rigid grammar than Czech. Bar Slovak, Czech is the only Slavonic language where the accent always occurs on the first syllable of a word, which in some instances, for example when pronounced by an angry wife or a traffic constable, makes it sound like a burst from a machine gun. And finally, Czech is the only Slavonic language that allows its speakers to utter an entire sentence without using one single vocal. Try, for instance, this: Strč prst skrz krk! — Put a finger through your throat!

Czech also has another dimension, which is often ignored. It divides everything masculine from everything feminine with a downright sexist fervour!

The English sentence I was tired and went to bed does not reveal whether a man or a woman said it. When repeated in French, you get a hint: j’étais fatiguée et je suis allée me coucher And now, take a look at the Czech version: Byla jsem unavená a šla jsem spát. Even the biggest ignoramus has to notice the speaker’s gender! One should, of course, avoid jumping to conclusions, but it can’t be completely ruled out that this linguistic sexism has had some consequences for the psychological relations between men and women (see: Feminism), and the natural way in which many Czech women demonstrate they are proud to be women.