History of the Czech language
Some other changes took place during roughly the 10th century: The disappearance of the odd yers strengthened the phonological contrast of palatalized (softened) and unpalatalized consonants, and resulted in alterations of epenthetic e and ∅ (null-phoneme).
[2] In the nominal declension, the traditional division according to the word-stem ending was progressively replaced by the gender principle (masculine, feminine and neuter) There were also three grammatical numbers: singular, dual and plural.
The earliest written records of Czech date to the 12th to 13th century, in the form of personal names, glosses and short notes.
The oldest known complete Czech sentence is a note on the foundation charter of the Litoměřice chapter at the beginning of the 13th century: The earliest texts were written in primitive orthography, which used the letters of the Latin alphabet without any diacritics, resulting in ambiguities, such as in the letter c representing the k /k/, c /ts/ and č /tʃ/ phonemes.
In the morphology, these changes deepened the differences between hard and soft noun types (sedláka 'farmer (gen.)' ↔ oráčě 'ploughman (gen.)'; města 'towns' ↔ mor’ě 'seas'; žena 'woman' ↔ dušě 'soul') as well as verbs (volati 'to call' ↔ sázěti 'to plant out').
The hard syllabic l changed to lu (Chlmec > Chlumec, dĺgý > dlúhý 'long'), as opposite to soft l’.
The original pronunciation of v was probably bilabial (as preserved in some Eastern-Bohemian dialects in syllable-final positions: diwnej 'peculiar', stowka 'a hundred'), but in the 14th century, the articulation was adapted to the unvoiced labiodental f. Prothetic v- has been added to all words beginning with o- (voko instead of oko 'eye') in the Bohemian dialects since this period.
As a consequence of this, aorist and imperfect start disappearing little by little and are replaced by the perfect (now called preterite, since it became the only past tense in Czech).
The suggestion is a work of an individual person, therefore this graphic system was accepted slowly, the digraph orthography was still in use.
This change resulted in the diphthongization of ý > ej in Common Czech (the widespread Bohemian interdialect).
The diphthong uo was sometimes recorded as o in the form of a ring above the letter u, which resulted in the grapheme ů (kuoň > kůň).
The orthography was predominantly diacritic; the dot in soft consonants was replaced by the caron which was used in č, ď, ň, ř, ť, ž.
Vowel length was denoted by the acute accent, except for ů developed from original uo.
In the pronunciation, the change of ý > ej was established, but it occurred in lesser prestige style text only.
imperative)', vajce > vejce 'egg') took place, but it was not applied in heterosyllabic aj (dají 'they will give', vajec 'egg (gen.
The function of the literary language was limited; it left the scientific field first, the discerning literature later, and the administration finally.
Under the rule of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II, who also reigned as king of Bohemia, the use of Czech was discouraged due to its association with Protestantism, and relegated to a spoken peasant tongue.
The zenith and, simultaneously, the end of the florescence of prestigious literary styles are represented by the works of Jan Amos Komenský.
The semicolon occurs as a punctuation mark for better and clear organization of excessive and complicated complex sentences.
The most likely first such work is Dissertatio apologetica pro lingua Slavonica praecipue Bohemica ("The defence of the Slavic language, of Czech in particular"), written in Latin by Bohuslav Balbín.
However, the people's language and literary genres of the previous period were strange to the enlightened intelligentsia.
The publication of Josef Jungmann’s five-part Czech-German Dictionary (1830–1835) contributed to the renewal of Czech vocabulary.
Antiqua was introduced instead of fractura in printing, and it led to the removal of the digraph ʃʃ and its replacement by the letter š.
The artistic literature often resorted to archaisms and did not respect the natural development of the spoken language.
In 1902, Jan Gebauer published the first Rules of Czech Orthography, which also contained an overview of the morphology.
The orthography of foreign words was changed to reflect their German pronunciation, especially writing z instead of s and marking the vowel length (e.g. gymnasium > gymnázium 'grammar school').
Social changes after World War II (1945) led to gradual diminishing of differences between dialects.
Since the second half of the 20th century, Common Czech elements have also been spreading to regions previously unaffected, as a consequence of the media's influence.
