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lproven

If you go back half a millennium, most languages are the same.

The sign above the door at the primary school outside Karlstejn Castle is unreadable to a speaker of modern Czech.

School website: https://www.skolakarlstejn.cz/

Better pics can be found easily.

It's quite rare for a language to remain close enough to be intelligible.

English is a mongrel, with influences from old French and ancient Saxon and Norse and Celtic. Every few centuries you go back, you strip away whole layers of additional vocabulary left by the descendants of successive invasions.

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Anglo-Saxon + Norman French + Latin + Greek. Surprisingly few words from Celtic languages.

> The sign above the door at the primary school outside Karlstejn Castle is unreadable to a speaker of modern Czech.

What? No it's not. It looks no more than ~100-150 years old, and is perfectly readable if you've ever seen a long s (like ſo).

It's really not.

After a lot of searching I found... my own post from Reddit 3Y ago!

https://www.reddit.com/r/czech/comments/17stwmi/can_anyone_r...

It has a relatively clear photo.

That's perfectly readable to me as a speaker of modern Czech, and it appears to have been readable to all the commenters on your post too.

> W téchto se dozwédá sjnjch pilné robé, Bohu čjm povinné, bratřjm, wlasti, sobě.

This is almost modern Czech, with j for í and w for v (which was the standard orthography for hundreds of years and would be familiar to any educated Czech).

Take the most famous poem in Czech, in its original orthography from 1836:

> Byl pozdnj wečer - prwnj mág

> Wečernj mág - byl lásky čas.

This is perfectly readable, like your sign.

One of the comments claims the sign is from 1487 - I would find this extremely unlikely. The mention of vlast (homeland) is suggestive of the era of the National Awakening (19th century), as is the orthography, font, and diacritics. (And the overall theme of education for God and country seems pretty anachronistic for 1487.)

If we go back in time, to say the Kralická Bible (1593), we're still well within the realm of readable text to modern Czechs:

> Na Počátku stwořil Bůh nebe a zemi. Země pak byla nesličná a pustá: a tma byla nad propastj: a Duch Božj wznássel se nad wodami. Y řekl Bůh: Buď swětlo: Y bylo swětlo.

Let's go back all the way to the earliest Slavic texts, about 1300 years ago, which largely predate Czech altogether:

> Iskonï bě slovo. Ï slovo bě u boga. Ï bogъ bě slovo.

A modern Czech would understand most of this, with the probable exception of iskonï ([na] konci, but used here to refer to the beginning). They would probably miss the exact tense being used for bě, but guess that it's a copula (they might see it as a portmanteau of bylo and je, which is close enough). This is probably comparably difficult for a Czech as say Chaucer is for an English speaker (ie not terribly), except it is half a millennium earlier than Chaucer.

Your overall point about language change has merit, but not all languages have changed at the same exact rate. Balto-Slavic languages are relatively conservative as a group (many linguists were very taken with Lithuanian when it was first noticed within Western academia, as it is so conservative that it has considerable utility in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European itself).

This is probably more detail than you wanted - I hope it's interesting and helpful. :)

It's fascinating, and thank you.

My Czech was terrible -- maybe just approaching B1 level when I left 3 years ago -- and it was not comprehensible to me. But it wasn't to my friend and to my (now) wife when we visited, so I took a photo and showed it to my colleagues at work and friends in the pub.

Similarly, still my favourite Czech sentence is the one that terrified me before I moved there:

Blb vlk pln žbrnd zdrhl hrd z mlh Brd skrz vrch Smrk v čtvrť srn Krč.

I memorised this (poorly) but had great fun showing it to people when I got there. Almost nobody could parse it at all.

Now, I'm an above-average English speaker. I am a very fast reader, and at school, I could cope with Chaucer just fine. Once I got my internal ear to hear it, it just made sense to me. (Beowulf, no.)

But I was the only one in my class. I can follow poetic and heavily distorted English fairly well, and it's a handy skill for a (former) professional English teacher. But I think I can follow more than most.

I certainly can't follow the ZŠ Karlstejn Czech, nor your poetic examples. I am very poor in the language. (It is my 6th foreign language, but they are all very very weak. But saying that, I've put more effort into Czech than all the rest put together, with little to show for it.)

I think you over-estimate the abilities of ordinary Czechs!

That's very cool. Don't knock yourself - congratulations on reaching a good level in such a fiendish language. My own SO hovers between A2 and B1 after many years, so I absolutely appreciate how frustrating Czech can be.

> Blb vlk pln žbrnd zdrhl hrd z mlh Brd skrz vrch Smrk v čtvrť srn Krč.

I do enjoy this one. It's all the more amusing in that it only uses fairly common vocab (though somewhat stylised inflection).

Speaking of parsing, you may be aware of the perfectly valid English sentence "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo". Or the sentence "The horse raced past the barn fell". If not, enjoy. :)

> I think you over-estimate the abilities of ordinary Czechs!

Very possibly! I think two of the examples I provided (the poem Máj and the quote from the Kralická bible) would genuinely be comprehensible to most Czechs, but I might be being too generous with the Karlštejn quote.

If I render it into standard orthography, give or take some endings I had to guess by squinting at the image on my phone, it comes out as:

> V těchto se dozvídá síních pilné robě, Bohu čím povinné, bratřím, vlasti, sobě.

Reordered to simplify the structure, and with glosses, you can probably make it out:

> V těchto [in these] síních [halls] se pilné [diligent] robě [child; archaic] dozvídá [learns, finds out], čím [that which is] povinné [compulsory] Bohu [dative, i.e. to/for God], bratřím [to/for brothers], vlasti [to/for the homeland], sobĕ [to/for oneself].

There is some basic vocab here (Bůh, bratr, vlast), some intermediate vocab (dozvědět se, pilné), and one clear-cut archaism (robě). The overall structure is quite poetic and somewhat inorganic - e.g. the separation of těchto and síních in "V těchto se dozvídá síních" is unnatural, and makes me think of scholastic Latin.

I'm honestly not sure how an ordinary person might read this. I think if it were in standard orthography, it would probably be fairly readable, but if you layer pre-modern orthography on top of the structural acrobatics and archaisms, you're probably right that the average person may struggle.

Čapek uses pre-modern orthography (e.g. gegj for její) for stylistic effect ('ye olde... ') in small sections of Válka s mloky, and modern editions do not generally transcribe these sections into modern orthography, so I think there is at least the implication that a literate Czech ought to be able to read it. To what extent that expectation has a relationship to reality I'm honestly unsure. The Czechs can be (far too) normative when it comes language, as you probably know, so perhaps the literati insist it be printed as is, and everyone else is just too scared to admit they can no longer read it. :P

> That's very cool. Don't knock yourself - congratulations on reaching a good level in such a fiendish language. My own SO hovers between A2 and B1 after many years, so I absolutely appreciate how frustrating Czech can be.

Díky moc!

Czech is... well, as a languague, Czech is sort of like the architecture of the old towns of Prague, or Tábor, or even Litomerice. Amazingly ornate and very decorative – but only so long as you're just passing through. I honestly had no idea the Indo-European language family did stuff like this, especially not right here in Europe. It's astonishing but man it's brutal to learn.

> the perfectly valid English sentence "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo".

This one is interesting because it is only valid in American English. In any other dialect it's just noise. To me as a Brit, "buffalo" is not and cannot be a verb, and it's not a place anyone much has heard of either – it's an obscure faraway foreign city (I think?) that I might forget existed if it were not for this one silly sentence.

It takes several minutes of explanation to a British English speaker what this means.

(I had to learn it, as a TEFL teacher.)

> I'm honestly not sure how an ordinary person might read this.

Let me put it this way. I showed all my friends and colleagues this pic. All were baffled. My graduate linguist colleague Nora asked for a copy, showed it to her mum, and to her surprise, her mum could read it and told Nora what it said. But, she told me, her mum studied ancient languages including historical Czech.

> Čapek uses pre-modern orthography (e.g. gegj for její) for stylistic effect ('ye olde... ') in small sections of Válka s mloky

I did not know that, but I've only read it in translation. (I am nowhere near ready for novels in Czech. Even comic books go over my head.) Great book, and I liked it much more than R.U.R.

But that was written ninety years ago. Things have changed.

I am reminded of listening to a dad explaining to his little son at Prague Zoo that "tram" was pronounced "trem" in English. I wanted badly to jump in and correct him, but I didn't.

It is not pronounced "trem". It sounds the same as in Czech: tram, tram. "Camping" is not "kemping", it's "kamping". The thing is this: about 100 - 125 years ago, a very upper class Received Pronunciation accent would say "man" as \mæen\, a dipthong: ma-en. That's what old textbooks record. But nobody has spoken like that since roughly the formation of the First Republic: it's as long gone as World War 1.

But just as 45Y ago my primary school French textbooks tranlated "voiture" as "carriage", as in "horse and carriage", this is not true any more. It's hopelessly obsolete. Nobody says "træm" or "mæn" any more, but the old textbooks people are using to teach from are obsolete. It's way easier than the textbooks make out.

> To me as a Brit, "buffalo" is not and cannot be a verb, and it's not a place anyone much has heard of either

Very fair! Given the structure of the underlying sentence, I wonder if there are other words that could pull triple duty as an adjective, verb and noun and make such a sentence work.

> But that was written ninety years ago. Things have changed.

Right! Though my point was more about recent reprints leaving those sections untouched.

Just to double check, I pulled a lovely 2023 edition of Válka s mloky off my bookshelf and snapped a photo for you. [0] Not only is the pre-modern orthography left unaltered ("W gednech cizjch nowinách..." for "V jednech cizích novinách..."), but the editors took pains to use an era-appropriate typeface for that section. Note also the repetition of pre-modern orthography for quoted noun phrases in the otherwise modern section below ("jak se jmenoval ten [gistý welitel]?").

I don't think the editors thought this page would be unreadable to a Czech reader in 2023.

> I am reminded of listening to a dad explaining to his little son at Prague Zoo that "tram" was pronounced "trem" in English. I wanted badly to jump in and correct him, but I didn't.

Though of course your correction would only be applicable for the standard modern English of southeast England. :) Americans and Canadians say /æ/ (if not /ɛə/ [1]), and Australian English does actually use the /ɛ/ that the Czech father was presumably saying (if not /e/). I suspect the most surprising thing about that word to a Czech would be the usual affricated realisation of word-initial /t/ as /tʃ/ (=č) when followed by /ɹ/ as in tram, train, etc.

Point taken about language change more broadly, I agree. French takes this to a hilarious extreme. (Textbooks: "Qu'est-ce que nous voulons?" Reality: "On veut quoi?")

Czech is tricky too, as I'm sure you know, being somewhat diglossic in the relationship between 'standard' Czech (to a large degree a 19th century artifice) and actually spoken ('common') Czech. Then you have the added layer of dialects, which often get completely ignored or denigrated (except Prague dialect, which seems to have a hall pass). Czech resources will teach 'standard' Czech and maybe throw in some Prague dialect for colour, which of course leaves the learner largely unequipped to handle the actual ('common') Czech most of the country speaks day to day (without actually giving them a full capacity to handle standard Czech either, which can be rather arcane in its higher registers).

The situation is even worse in Moravia, where the entire rich tapestry of dialects - as different from one another as they are from Bohemian and west Slovak dialects - is just reduced to the single stereotypical Brno slang term for tram ("šalina").

I'm not a huge fan of how Czechs view and relate to (and teach) Czech. I wish there were a better appreciation that the norms of standard Czech, promulgated by the Ústav pro jazyk český, are not akin to the laws of gravity or murder, but one norm among many (and in many cases not even a particularly good norm).

[0] https://imgur.com/a/E87u7QY

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//æ/_raising

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