Re: what means capek?
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In reply to:
Re: what means capek?
Thomas Brabec 11/18/01
Thomas,
The pronunciation would not vary so much by location as it would depend upon whether or not the diacritical mark is there.In Czech "Capek" might be Capek or C'apek, pronounced "TSAH-pehk" and "CHAH-pehk," respectively.I think the "C'apek" version has a meaning related to either a cap/hat or a billy-goat (as in "Capricorn"); I'm not familiar with the "stork" meaning, which must go with the "TSAH-pehk" pronunciation.
Saints Cyril and Methodius did not develop the written Czech language.They worked mostly in what is now Slovakia at the invitation of the prince who ruled what was to become, briefly, Great Moravia. While in Slovakia/Moravia, Cyril/Constantine invented the glagolitic alphabet, the first alphabet with symbols that captured the sounds peculiar to Slavic languages.Glagolitic was based primarily on lower case Greek letters, with some Hebrew and Aramaic symbols thrown in.Although Cyril died in Rome after spending just a few years in Slovakia/Moravia, Methodius was appointed bishop to the Moravia/Panonia area and worked there another 20 years.However, when he died, the western-rite German-speaking clergy (who had been working as missionaries in Slovakia/Moravia before Cyril and Methodius arrived and were jealous of their success) expelled the priests whom Methodius had ordained and trained in the eastern-rite liturgy and the scribes he had trained to write in glagolitic.These scattered, some west to what would eventually become the Czech Lands, but most southeast to the Kingdom of Bulgaria, which had recently become Christian, as well.There they set up monasteries and worked at transcribing the Bible and other religious texts in a version of glagolitic that used upper-case Greek letters; that new version became known as the Cyrillic alphabet, to honor the inventor of its precursor.These transcribed texts were a great help, a hundred years later, to the missionaries who succeeded in converting the people who would become the Russians and Ukrainians.The Cyrillic alphabet is, of couse, still used by the Russians, Ukrainians, Bulgarians, and Serbs.
The expulsion of the glagolitic-writing clergy from Slovakia/Moravia around the year 875 ended a struggle over whether Western Slavic languages would be written in glagolitic or in Latin.In practice, they were rarely written at all.For several centuries, the Latin/Roman alphabet was used exclusively and texts from the region were written in the Latin language or in German.Around the year 1400, Jan Hus became prominent in Prague as a preacher against abuses in the Church, a forerunner of Martin Luther.Part of his program was to promote the use of Czech as a written language.It was he who, before he was burned at the stake in 1415, developed the use of diacritical marks to adapt the Latin alphabet to better handle Slavic sounds.I don't know how he came up with the idea.
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Re: what means capek?
Radek 11/19/01