More on Czech Nouns:
Czech has borrowed a lot from German vocabulary over the centuries, but various reformers have tried to correct this defect in the past. The first was the famous Jan Hus (yea team) who was a linguistic as well as a religious reformer. Hus taught at the university founded by Holy Roam Emperor Charles IV in 1348. What Hus did was not just to try and eliminate German and Latin loanwords but also to provide a phonetic spelling that contrasts with Polish and even Russian in its accuracy in regards to the spoken word. After the 'Battle of White Mountain' in 1620 when the Czech Protestants (Hussites) were defeated by the armies of the Emperor and the Catholic League the Czech endured a virtual "linguistic reign of terror" under the thumb of the Jesuits. An entire national literature was the victim of an attempt at eradication as anything written in a language other than German or Latin was considered heretical. One monk named Konias was reported to have single-handedly burned 30,000 books in Czech.
The Czech language and its situation began to improve under the rule of Emperor Josef II who followed Maria Theresa on the Austrian throne in 1780. Czech teachers were allowed to teach in Czech again. This led to the Ceske narodni obrozeni, The Czech Peoples' Revival. In 1809 Josef Dobrovsky published the Ausfurrliches Lehrgebaude der bohmische Sprache (note the German title) that established the rules of modern Czech. later Josef Jungmann published a 'History of Czech Literature' and a Czech/German dictionary in five volumes.
Today Czech actually consists of three language subsets rather than one. There is "literary Czech" which is even more formal than literary or legal English or French(Spisovna cestina), 'spoken Czech', the usual "good language" form (Hovorova cestina) and "Common Czech" (Obecna cestina), the ordinary "street language". The latter has a simpler grammar, and it also has the greatest number of "loan words" from languages such as German, especially in swear words and insults. It also produces a large number of neologisms that take much longer to reach the other two versions of Czech. The street language of Czech shows the usual evolution of language away from inflexion.
The Polish language also apparently has 7 cases for its nouns just as Czech does (nominative, genitive, accusative, dative, instrumental, locative and vocative) , and, like Czech the declension is complicated by "animate" and "inanimate" variations. Russian, by contrast, has only six cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental and locative). It has the three genders and even three declensions but is less complex than either Polish or Czech.
One wag has commented that, "Czech may drive foreigners trying to learn it to utter despair. They can, however, take comfort in the fact that the language poses problems even for the Czechs themselves" and, "...Czech is so rich,precise and,unfortunately, also complicated that a foreigner trying to learn the language may be driven to suicide. Either because he or she never manages to learn it, or because of the utter depression that follows when the foreigner realizes how primitive his or her own mother tongue is".
Czech also has the "bizarre" character that consonants such as "r" can serve the function of vowels in many words. Thus it is possible to say a sentence in Czech such as "Strc prst skrz krk " -"Put a finger through your throat" that contains not a single vowel.
All told an interesting and unique experience in being introduced to such a language. More on Czech later.

Molly

The Czech Language:
Before going to the Czech Republic I attempted - emphasis on "attempted" to learn a little of the language. Aside from an attempt many years ago to learn Russian, which progressed even less than my Czech, this was my first exposure to a Slavic language. What I did learn certainly endeared me to a variety of people in the country as the Czechs are under the opinion that "nobody tries to learn Czech". I hardly devoted as much time to the study as I should have, and my attempts at learning the language were pretty feeble. It wasn't helped by the fact that the language has a stunning complexity, even in relation to Greek, let alone Romance languages. Let me explain.
Czech is one of the West Slavic languages, a group that also includes Slovak, Polish, Pomeranian (Kashubian) and Sorbian. Polish, spoken by about 46 million people, is the largest of this group. Czech speakers number only about 12 million. Like most Slavic languages, except for Bulgarian and Macedonian, the Czech language is highly inflected ie nouns, verbs and adjectives change their form depending upon person,gender, use in the sentence, etc.. In the case of the nouns this infection is far greater than any of the Romance languages with which I am familiar (though I know little of Romanian- which apparently has three cases- or the more "exotic" items such as Ladin, Rhaeto-Romanche, Galician, Ladino, Sardinian,etc..). All of these have only two genders (I admit a small number of neuter "pronouns"), and "case" is hardly a matter of concern. The variants in plural formation in Spanish, for instance, hardly deserve the name of "declension" because while "villa", "revolucion" and "lux" may form the plural in different fashions, they remain the same in all positions in the sentence. French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Italian,etc. have lost the inflections of "case" that Latin had. In Latin there are 7 noun cases, the nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, ablative and locative. I had the advantage of having had five years of Latin in my misspent youth so I am at least familiar with the "idea" if not exact usage. The corresponding cases in Czech are nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative and instrumental. The differences seem slight, but they contain a world of difference.
More on Czech nouns in future posts.