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MED Magazine - Issue 47 - October 2007 From robots to soap operas: Introduction This article takes a brief look at the relationship between the English and Czech languages. After considering a few historical borrowings from Czech, the much more commonplace appearance of English in the modern-day Czech language will be examined. Continuing this look into positive transfer, I will highlight a few ‘true friends’, before moving on to issues of negative transfer. As it is not possible to deal with all aspects of language interference within one article, I will touch briefly upon the main areas, such as syntactical, phonological and orthographical interference, before concentrating on negative transfer in the field of vocabulary. ‘False friends’ will be considered, along with some examples of Czech-English homographs. In conclusion, I will provide ideas for dealing with interference in English, and a few links for further study. Positive transfer Androids, money and weapons Borrowings from other languages are frequent; around 70% of English words actually originated in other languages (Holá, 2003). Only a couple of these are of Czech origin however, the most famous being robot, a word coined by the Czech novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and essayist Karel Čapek (1890-1938). It is, perhaps, surprising that the word dollar can be traced back to 1519 when it was a monetary unit in Bohemia. The Czech word tolar is a borrowing and adaptation from the German Joachimsthaler, connected to the place where the silver coin was minted (the town of Jáchymov in Bohemia, later notorious for its uranium mines, used as a forced labour camp under the Communist regime). The other two words worth mentioning are pistol and howitzer (a large gun with a short barrel) - perhaps an allusion to the Czech tradition in precision weapon making. Recent Czech borrowings from English The Czech language, meanwhile, includes a host of everyday expressions and specialized terminology that originated in English. But it is not only the obvious hardware, software, internet, modem, mobil, email (all of which are used internationally these days), but also other expressions springing up mostly in newspapers and other mass media (which, incidentally, is masmédia in Czech), very often not out of necessity but as a result of bad translation or insufficient knowledge. Recently, Czech has acquired a number of through-translations from English; expressions such as mýdlová opera (soap opera), kostlivci ve skříni (skeletons in the cupboard), turistický průmysl (tourist industry), to name just a few. It is difficult to predict whether these terms are here to stay, or if they are just a ‘fad’. Well-established international words in Czech This selection is based on Lída Holá’s booklet for learners of Czech as a foreign language, published in 2003. Most of the listed words are of Latin or Greek origin. The list is divided according to parts of speech, into nouns, adjectives and verbs. Czech is an inflecting language, so the nouns and adjectives have a gender (masculine, feminine or neuter) and are declined in various ways. There are seven cases in Czech. The verbs are conjugated. As a result, the endings and/or prefixes can change the word, so that it is only the root that can be recognized. An awareness of endings and prefixes can help in discovering the root. The following selection is by no means exhaustive and should only serve as an example. Preference has been given to words that have no synonym in Czech. Nouns
Adjectives
Verbs
It follows from the above that there are changes in spelling and in pronunciation. However, they are fairly systematic, e.g. the English ‘c’ changes into ‘k’, ‘s’ becomes ‘z’ in all the verbs, as in the American spelling. The verbs also all have the same ending –ovat and are thus easy to conjugate, all following the same pattern (i.e. charakterizuji/u, charakterizuješ, charakterizuje, charakterizujeme, charakterizujete, charekterizují). The adjectives end in –cký and can easily become adverbs by shortening the final syllable to –cky (e.g. ekologický – ekologicky). For those ending in –í or –ý, this just changes it to –ě (e.g. rasový – rasově, dietní – dietně). There are many more ‘true friends‘ that can make learning English or Czech much easier. Negative transfer The many faces of interference Language interference is not restricted to the area of lexis; we can find many grammatical, as well as syntactical, phonological and orthographical examples of interference. These include, among others, problems in the areas of tenses, aspect, prepositions (grammatical), word order, modal verbs, cleft sentences (syntactical), capitalizing, punctuation and the use of italics (orthographical). Phonological deficiencies are a separate issue, better left to the specialist. All forms of interference are relevant for the learner of a foreign language and as such should be included in textbooks and dictionaries. Fortunately enough, many of them are international, but there are also many which are connected to one language in particular. The following concentrates on areas of vocabulary that pose a problem for the Czech-learner of English. False friends The following is only a selection, out of the many expressions, listed in Zrádná slova v angličtině / False Friends in English (Hladký: 1990), English or Czenglish (Sparling: 1990) and on Lída Holá’s list. It is worth noting here that many of these expressions pose the same problems in other languages that are related to Czech, both linguistically (for example Slovak, Polish and Russian) and culturally (German, Hungarian), as referred to in the preceding articles in this series in MED Magazine. These include, among others:
The following list gives more examples of false friends, some perhaps overlapping with other languages, others truly Czech:
Examples of Czech-English homographs
Conclusion It has always been a problem for teachers of English to decide what is ‘CORRECT and what to teach. English has no ‘Ústav pro jazyk český’ (the authority that decides what is right or wrong in Czech). USAGE is The Almighty in English. We need to explain this to our students and prepare them for the fact that there are no hard and fast rules that can help them. When teaching students to avoid interference, I suggest telling them: ‘Your main concern should be to be understood correctly. To this end, you have to change your thinking and adopt “the native speaker’s attitude”, as you will probably be expected to use standard English, not your version of it. Watch out for nuances of meaning, study “chunks” of language, not isolated words. You are bound to succeed, sooner or later. English is omnipresent these days, no matter how hard it may be to master.’ Activities / Links To practise avoiding interference, students could be asked to:
The Czech expression kuchyňský robot (kitchen robot as a false friend) refers to a food processor. Englisch mit Oxford 333 'Horror' Mistakes, G. and P. Allison (Berlin 1992) Next in the series In the next article we’ll take a look at language interference between Portuguese and English. Copyright © 2007 Macmillan Publishers Limited This webzine is brought to you by Macmillan Education |