To Be Or Not To Be, Singular - grammar presentation confusing
As a native speaker of Czech, I have no idea what this part of the grammar info is supposed to mean. Would you please clarify or add examples to the text? "There are certain words which Czech likes to have in the second position in a sentence, and it will sometimes add a redundant subject pronoun to accomplish this instead of reshuffling the whole sentence. (The second "position" does not simply refer to showing up after the first word but rather after the first unit of meaning.)" (The rest of the explanation is nice and simple, good job! :-) )
4 Comments
We natives take words in the 2nd position naturally and don't quite realize that the same patterns repeat over and over again in the sentences. These words are called clitics (or příklonky in Czech). There can be only one clitics in a sentence, but also a few more. In case there are more, they can't all be placed in the second position, so they need to be sorted and follow rules to make the sentences understandable.
You can read more about the clitics here: https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Příklonka or for an English version here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_word_order#Clitics
Thanks. And the question (not for us natives) is whether or not an early warning like this helps those learning Czech as a foreign language. The author of the T&N in question is a U.S. native, and he clearly thought it was useful to make the remark.
I agree. I was primarily reacting to the OP, who said he is a native. I believe it might help some people, others might be confused at the beginning but latest with the introduction of past tense everyone should have a vague idea of this topic because that's where they will start using it intensively and it will help them arrange the words in sentences in the correct order.
Second position in the clause is a place for words like "se", for example "Oni se mají rádi" or "My se o ni doopravdy staráme!" or "Nesmíte se ho bát!" or "My se nevzdáme!" or "Díváme se na televizi."
