[OpenIndiana-discuss] Bash brace expansion in non-C locales??

[Jim Klimov]

On 2013-03-13 10:17, Marcel Telka wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 09:56:07AM +0100, Hans J. Albertsson wrote:

Way off-topic ;)

>> A Q about the Slovak language: while you were in a union with the
>> Czechs, did the languages start to unify spontaneously? I mean like
>> vocabulary changes, minor grammatical drift, spelling oddities
>> changing and so on and so forth?
>
> It is hard to say for sure. Both languages were changed in those ca 70 years we
> were together in Czechoslovakia, but I do not think they started to unify in
> any notable way. Most probably they even diverged. Both languages are so
> different that some young Czech people (< 25) have problems to understand
> Slovak language comfortably these days.

Having lived in Czech republic for a couple of years now, starting with
the language courses taught by the philological faculty members of the
country's major university, I might convey their notion that there are
about 10 million speakers in the country, and about 12 million overall
(including USA and other overseas fractions). For the basic level it
should suffice to know that there are about 6 frequently-used branches:
proper official language, literary language, "czech of 19. century",
modern slang, eastern-czech (Moravian) and western-czech (Bohemian).
On a deeper level several more cities and locations have their dialects
spoken by several hundred thousand people with distinctly different
active vocabularies, suffixes and rules. Apparently, areas closer to
Slovakia geographically have trends in the language that are closer
as well. The official language is a somewhat artificial amalgam of
some branches, rather static in its rules and vocabulary, and it is
taught much like a foreign language by people in (or preparing for)
higher education, because it is not native for any Czech sub-region.

I'd say that phonetically especially with its word-endings (due to
declinations) the Slovak language is closer to Russian, while much
of the structure is similar enough to Czech so that reading texts in
either language while having learned one is no problem. I'm not sure
about hearing/speaking it though, but they've had a Czech minister
natively from Slovakia, who spoke Slovak in the government sessions,
and it was not a barrier for Czech governmental work, either.

But yes, they are quite different - I was told it takes several weeks
of watching Slovak TV and reading Slovak websites for a Czech youth
to become capable (fluent? likely not) in Slovak. Just as well, the
Czech books and newspapers from some 50-70 years ago, or even more,
might be just as illegible to a random modern Czech youth ;)

As for inclinations into the language from its neighbors... I'd say
that Czech has a lot from Latin-German roots with Slavic suffixes
(verbs like "existovat" = "to exist", adjectives like "perfektní" =
"perfect" and so on), just like Russian has a lot of regurgitated
words now stemmed from the aristocracy's standard French language.
Among such noise it is much harder to discern additions from other
closely related languages - Slavic in this case.

I am not sure I can contrive an example word in Czech which would
have "ch" as separate letters; this would most likely also be a
combination of two word-roots, and I'm almost sure they would be
liasoned by an "e" (becoming "ceh"), at least in most cases.

BTW, beside vowels and consonants, the Czech language also has a
number of "semi-vowels" which are consonants with a weak sound.
In some words they take role of a vowel for phonetics, thus there
can be words and phrases without vowel characters at all. Possibly
the most popular example is "strč prst skrz krk" (put a finger
through the throat) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strč_prst_skrz_krk
Ah, yes, and there are also diacritics and many wild rules about
them, sometimes with barely noticeable influence on pronunciation
and serious disdain from officials who must work with and respect
the official proper language (which the SMS-generation can't write
due to lots of practice with ASCII-only SMSes) :)

Hope this helps (to get you puzzled),
//Jim Klimov

PS: Sorry of the large offtopic, but I didn't start it this time ;)