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

[Hans J. Albertsson]

A-M-A-Z-I-N-G

Computing is SOOO boring in comparison..


On 2013-03-15 01:25, Jim Klimov wrote:
> 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 ;)
>
>
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