Ok, so my first¨”Word of the Day” of the New Year may strike you as pretty irrelevant when it comes to general conversation, being a word you may use at most once every 6 months, but it illustrates a good point. In most languages, names for exotic animals tend to be quite similar, being new additions to the vocabulary. So we have “giraffe” in English, “girafe” in French, “girafa” in Italian and “zhirafa” in Russian. All pretty similar, and here at least, Czech follows suit with “žirafa”. However, this is more the exception. The word “penguin” has its equivalents in most of the worlds languages, “pingvin” in Russian, for example. In Czech, the word is “tučňák”. This clearly bares no relation to the international term. It is one of many words that were coined during the “National Revival” where scholars attempted to create new words from existing stems and affixes, much like in Icelandic. Which all means that Czech has a lot of words bearing no relation to English, making it even more difficult to learn. Thank you, Revivalists!
No comments:
Post a Comment