Czech

How a written Bohemian took shape

Czech first appears in glosses and short notes of the 12th and 13th centuries, and literary works follow in the late 13th and early 14th. In the early 15th century the Bohemian Reformation spread writing in Czech, and Jan Hus worked on its spelling and on bringing written Czech closer to speech. The Kralice Bible, printed between 1579 and 1593, was the first complete Czech translation from the original languages and served as the model for the standard language afterwards.

The defeat of the Bohemian Revolt in 1620 drove Protestant intellectuals into exile. From 1627 Czech and German were both official in the Kingdom of Bohemia, and in the 18th century German came to dominate among the upper classes.

Who made Czech a language of culture again

The national revival from the mid-18th century returned Czech to high culture. Josef Dobrovský's grammar of 1809, written in German, did not expect Czech to recover, but Josef Jungmann and others used it to argue for a revival. They wrote í where j had been and j where g had been, ended infinitives in t and stopped capitalising nouns, a habit borrowed from German. Those reforms moved Czech further from Slovak. Journals from that period read today with little difficulty.

What the háček does

The alphabet has 42 graphemes, and ch is the only digraph, filed after h. The háček forms š, ž and č, and also ň, ě, ř, ť and ď, which are uncommon outside Czech. Long vowels take an acute accent or, for ů, a ring. Words can have complex consonant clusters or no vowel at all, and stress falls on the first syllable.