New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome

> Blb vlk pln žbrnd zdrhl hrd z mlh Brd skrz vrch Smrk v čtvrť srn Krč.

I do enjoy this one. It's all the more amusing in that it only uses fairly common vocab (though somewhat stylised inflection).

Speaking of parsing, you may be aware of the perfectly valid English sentence "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo". Or the sentence "The horse raced past the barn fell". If not, enjoy. :)

> I think you over-estimate the abilities of ordinary Czechs!

Very possibly! I think two of the examples I provided (the poem Máj and the quote from the Kralická bible) would genuinely be comprehensible to most Czechs, but I might be being too generous with the Karlštejn quote.

If I render it into standard orthography, give or take some endings I had to guess by squinting at the image on my phone, it comes out as:

> V těchto se dozvídá síních pilné robě, Bohu čím povinné, bratřím, vlasti, sobě.

Reordered to simplify the structure, and with glosses, you can probably make it out:

> V těchto [in these] síních [halls] se pilné [diligent] robě [child; archaic] dozvídá [learns, finds out], čím [that which is] povinné [compulsory] Bohu [dative, i.e. to/for God], bratřím [to/for brothers], vlasti [to/for the homeland], sobĕ [to/for oneself].

There is some basic vocab here (Bůh, bratr, vlast), some intermediate vocab (dozvědět se, pilné), and one clear-cut archaism (robě). The overall structure is quite poetic and somewhat inorganic - e.g. the separation of těchto and síních in "V těchto se dozvídá síních" is unnatural, and makes me think of scholastic Latin.

I'm honestly not sure how an ordinary person might read this. I think if it were in standard orthography, it would probably be fairly readable, but if you layer pre-modern orthography on top of the structural acrobatics and archaisms, you're probably right that the average person may struggle.

Čapek uses pre-modern orthography (e.g. gegj for její) for stylistic effect ('ye olde... ') in small sections of Válka s mloky, and modern editions do not generally transcribe these sections into modern orthography, so I think there is at least the implication that a literate Czech ought to be able to read it. To what extent that expectation has a relationship to reality I'm honestly unsure. The Czechs can be (far too) normative when it comes language, as you probably know, so perhaps the literati insist it be printed as is, and everyone else is just too scared to admit they can no longer read it. :P

Very fair! Given the structure of the underlying sentence, I wonder if there are other words that could pull triple duty as an adjective, verb and noun and make such a sentence work.

> But that was written ninety years ago. Things have changed.

Right! Though my point was more about recent reprints leaving those sections untouched.

Just to double check, I pulled a lovely 2023 edition of Válka s mloky off my bookshelf and snapped a photo for you. [0] Not only is the pre-modern orthography left unaltered ("W gednech cizjch nowinách..." for "V jednech cizích novinách..."), but the editors took pains to use an era-appropriate typeface for that section. Note also the repetition of pre-modern orthography for quoted noun phrases in the otherwise modern section below ("jak se jmenoval ten [gistý welitel]?").

I don't think the editors thought this page would be unreadable to a Czech reader in 2023.

> I am reminded of listening to a dad explaining to his little son at Prague Zoo that "tram" was pronounced "trem" in English. I wanted badly to jump in and correct him, but I didn't.

Though of course your correction would only be applicable for the standard modern English of southeast England. :) Americans and Canadians say /æ/ (if not /ɛə/ [1]), and Australian English does actually use the /ɛ/ that the Czech father was presumably saying (if not /e/). I suspect the most surprising thing about that word to a Czech would be the usual affricated realisation of word-initial /t/ as /tʃ/ (=č) when followed by /ɹ/ as in tram, train, etc.

Point taken about language change more broadly, I agree. French takes this to a hilarious extreme. (Textbooks: "Qu'est-ce que nous voulons?" Reality: "On veut quoi?")

Czech is tricky too, as I'm sure you know, being somewhat diglossic in the relationship between 'standard' Czech (to a large degree a 19th century artifice) and actually spoken ('common') Czech. Then you have the added layer of dialects, which often get completely ignored or denigrated (except Prague dialect, which seems to have a hall pass). Czech resources will teach 'standard' Czech and maybe throw in some Prague dialect for colour, which of course leaves the learner largely unequipped to handle the actual ('common') Czech most of the country speaks day to day (without actually giving them a full capacity to handle standard Czech either, which can be rather arcane in its higher registers).

The situation is even worse in Moravia, where the entire rich tapestry of dialects - as different from one another as they are from Bohemian and west Slovak dialects - is just reduced to the single stereotypical Brno slang term for tram ("šalina").

I'm not a huge fan of how Czechs view and relate to (and teach) Czech. I wish there were a better appreciation that the norms of standard Czech, promulgated by the Ústav pro jazyk český, are not akin to the laws of gravity or murder, but one norm among many (and in many cases not even a particularly good norm).

[0] https://imgur.com/a/E87u7QY

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//æ/_raising