17 Comments
I feel like this course will have a fetish for machines, just like the Hungarian course has a fetish for flying kindergarten teacher.
The English word "robot" comes from a play by a Czech writer about a hundred years ago.
Robota is not really equal to 'slave labour' or 'slavery'. For language and history buffs: corvée
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"stroj" is one of the model words which children learn at school. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_declension#Masculine_inanimate
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The construction: 'last machine' doesn't make much sense anyway. But I assume it's just for the purpose of building vocabulary and basic grammar.
There are books with that construction in the title. Not that anybody should expect eloquence with a vocabulary of twelve words and no verbs :-)
Oh you're right, maybe a book title... But it makes little sense anyway.
The last = the most recent. But This one is more meaningful than "final", (except if you see a lot of machines when you travel by car.)
But not the final in the meaning of some intention or fullfilment just that the number of machine is already completed.
I think you mean that "posledni" does not take a sense of meaning "ultimate" or :perfected".
This adjective has "i" instead of "y". Is it because of the soft consonant that comes before?
You have to get a different perception of softening in Slavic languages so as to grasp it better.
Every consonant can either be soft or not soft, there is no specific list.
Plus the consonant is not actually modified that much (it sometimes kind of is, but let us discuss that later as it is not that important right now), what actually makes it "soft" is a modest English "y" sound (as in "yes") coming after the consonant.
In the case of i and e, the "y" sound is included in the following vowel: treat (ě) as "ye" and (i/í) as "yi". (Y/ý) is a simple "i" sound that does not have the precedent English "y" sound, or, in other words, it does not soften the previous consonant.
So in the case of (Ne) and (Ny) N is not softened, in the case of (Ně) and (Ni) N is softened.
The aforementioned "different perception" means you must treat vowels as either "softening" or "not softening" depending on whether they soften the preceding consonant. That must make it easier for you to grasp the essence of palatalization.
In fact, this is why Cyrillic suits better for Slavic languages since it has different vowel graphemes for the "softening" and "not softening" vowels, but switching to it is unfortunately not even considered hence the political aspect of language.
