{"id":17530,"date":"2019-02-21T15:26:36","date_gmt":"2019-02-21T15:26:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=17530"},"modified":"2021-07-27T20:39:55","modified_gmt":"2021-07-27T20:39:55","slug":"a-plethora-of-pronouns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=17530","title":{"rendered":"A plethora of pronouns"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Czech<\/p>\n

Recently I have been learning some more Czech. I work through a few lessons on Duolingo and Mondly<\/a> every day. Even though it’s many years since I last studied any Czech, I find I can understand quite a lot, and guess unknown words from context. One thing I struggle with though is all the noun declensions, and the many different forms of pronouns.<\/p>\n

Czech has seven noun cases, so nouns and pronouns can come in up to fourteen different forms (6 or 7 in the singular and 6 or 7 in the plural), depending on the role they play in a sentence. In fact the plural forms are the same for some cases, but singular pronouns have long and short forms, and different forms after prepositions.<\/p>\n

For example, I is j\u00e1<\/strong> in the nominative, which is mainly used for emphasis and is generally dropped – (J\u00e1) vid\u00edm t\u011b<\/em> = I see you. The nominative singular of you is ty<\/em>: t\u011b<\/em> is the accusative (and genitive) short form – the long form is tebe<\/em>. Word order is flexible, so you could also say T\u011b vid\u00edm<\/em> or J\u00e1 t\u011b vid\u00edm<\/em>. Is there any difference in emphasis between the different word orders?<\/p>\n

Some more examples:<\/p>\n