Re: Natlang Question: "Quiet" in Czech?

#
# My maternal grandmother immigrated to the USA from Czechoslovakia
# sometime soon after WWI, and she was very young at the time.  According
# to my mother, my grandmother only remembered one word in Czech, meaning
# "quiet".  When my mother pronounced it for me, it sounded like [tSIxO],
# with palatized [tS] and [x] and with what sounded like schwa offglides on
# the [I] and the [O].
# I'm sure at least someone here speaks Czech or knows something about
# it... does that word sound like Czech?  If yes, how is it supposed to be
# pronounced and spelled?  If not, do you know what else could it be?
#

Was it certainly czech, or could it have been slovak?

The word in both languages is spelled "ticho".

In slovak it would (should? ) be pronounced [cixo], and probably
the same in czech, though czech tends to not palatalize some things
that are definitely palatalized in slovak.

Palatal stops tend to get misprounced and misheard as affricates, I find.

My grandparents speak russian, but now that they're older and hardly use
the language any more, they tend to mispronuce things in a similar manner.

ie. for ru. "spat'", they say [spaS] (or maybe this is a dialectical
 pronunciation?)

-tim

http://www.zece.com/conlang/

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