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Comment by smcl | Hacker News Reader

Is any Slovak speaker able to comment on the excerpt from the article below? Equating the Czech "ů" and the Slovak "ô" sounds wrong to me but my experience with Slovak is very limited.

" As for the letter ů, as used in the Czech Republic, the story is a similar one to the Swedish. In the sixteenth century, the pronunciation of /uo/ changed to /uː/, prompting a need to reflect this in written Czech. Reformationists with close ties to Germany brought the Early New High German ů with them and used it in the influential translation of the Czech Bible kralická. (The closely related Slovakian language writes the same sound with an ô after Martin Hattala’s 1852 grammar.) "

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ů and ú are pronounced the same in czech /u:/ - the only difference is grammar. There are very obscure rules as when to to write ů or ú (wheter it's in the middle of the word, end of the word, exclamations etc...)

Slovak language also has ú and to my ears it's pronounced the same as in czech. ô is pronounced /uo/. It might be that the pronunciation has changed in czech language during hundreds of years. Same is the case of ä in slovak that used to have different pronunciation to a regular e but after many years (people being lazy) it is just being pronounced as a regular e.

So if we talk about pronunciation used these days then ů and ô are not pronounced the same at all.

I'm no historian/linguist. Born in slovakia studied in czech republic

Cool - so the ů/ú difference in Czech I was aware of (or at least I roughly understood it to be related to its position in the word).

But I understand now - the origin is shared, but they're definitely pronounced differently nowadays.

Thanks!

Czech/Slovak speaker here. Slovak kept the original sound /uo/, which is written as ô. There are many words with a simple ô/ů substitution, for example Czech “trůn” /tru:n/ vs. Slovak “trôn” /truon/, meaning “throne”.

So no, they are not phonetically equivalent, but they are related.

As far as I know it's not trôn but trón in slovak ...

EDIT: Thinking about it, kůň and kôň (horse) might be a better example

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