Re: Lack of ambiguity in Czech, was Re: EU allumettes

Tommie L Powell said:
> Doug Dee wrote:
>> Tommie Powell had written:
>>
>> >Actually, there are some natlangs that are very nearly
>> >impossible to make ambiguous statements in (without
>> >violating mandatory rules of grammar).  Czech is one
>> >-- so the Czechs have become adept at sneaking
>> >ambiguity into sentences by slurring key words (so that
>> >listeners can imagine that something else is being said)!
>>
>> It's a bit cruel to make a statement like that without giving
>> some examples of how Czech is supposed to manage this
>> trick, or at least referring us to a book or other source.
>
> Okay, here goes.
>
> The Czech lands were part of the Austo-Hungarian Empire
> for hundreds of years.  Until 1848, they weren't treated any
> worse than the empire's other Slavic peoples.  But they
> revolted in 1848 and, after their revolt was crushed, the
> empire instituted draconian measures against them --
> including forbidding the speaking of their language!
>
> That attempt to abolish their language lasted about 40 years
> and nearly succeeded.  Only peasants continued to speak it
> (and only with close relatives, in the privacy of their homes).
> So the language was reduced to about 650 words before
> the empire eased up on its ban ever-so-slightly (by allowing
> Czechs to form clubs to do calisthenics together, and letting
> them speak Czech with each other in those "Sokol" clubs).
>
> Czech intellectuals saw that as a golden opportunity to revive
> the Czech language.  But they decided that the "new" Czech
> language should be "pure Czech" -- with no borrowings from
> foreign languages -- so its entire vocabulary would have be
> built out of the 650 words that the peasants had preserved.
>
> So Czech is, to a large extent, a conlang created by Czech
> intellectuals through the Sokol movement in the 1890s.
> And because it can express everything with variations of only
> about 650 words, it's easy to find words sufficiently similar
> to be mistaken for each other when they're slurred.

1. How does that show that it's hard to make unambiguous statements in Czech?

2. The "Czech is a conlang" and the "last 650 words surviving the Habsburg
oppression" things are urban legends, I'm afraid. The development of Czech
vernacular literature was unbroken throughout the 19th century except for
a brief stagnation in the 50's -- and the language itself certainly didn't
experience anything like the attrition suggested by the urban legend. The
Empire's attempted suppression of Czech (which went on well before the
1848 uprising, BTW) actually had an effect which was opposite to what was
intended: it gave us the Jungmann dictionary, the poetry of Ma'cha and and
essays of Neruda (and ultimately the independent republic and the concept
of 'robot'...).


-- Mark