Horrifying Cluster of Consonants

Of course, I'm borrowing the phrase "horrifying cluster of consonants" from Lída Holá, who wrote Czech Step by Step, which I acquired earlier this week during my first day of Czech language class for beginners.

Naturally, I'd already much earlier noted the strange collections of consonants in words, like the word for today, "Thursday," čtvrtek.  Or the name of the river that runs through Prague, Vltava. Or even the word for "today," dnes.  In the summer of 2008, my first time here in Czech Republic, and well in the middle of my graduate studies in English and its relationship to other languages, I was busy taking note of these words, remembering academic books on what are acceptable strings of letters in one language relative to another.

My Lída Holá book has listed two particular examples that boggle my Anglicized mind - strč prst skrz krk (which means "Put your finger in your throat.") and vzcvrnkls (which means "Did you flick up?"). I have to glance down at my book to spell these out properly, and we aren't even on the subject yet of pronunciation.

I don't think this particular story has any sort of conclusion, and I may have just been rambling on, chatting with you about my new language's "horrifying clusters of consonants." Not to mention the daunting seven cases which I only vaguely remember encountering as I pursued my master's degree in English Studies, Language.  Something about more than just the nominative case, but the genitive, locative, even vocative case. You don't need to know all the gory details, unless you're an English teacher, or an English major, like one of my former classmates.

Let's just say that since English has such a strict word order, we don't need so many inflections in the language. Or is it because we've lost the inflections (which we used to have in Old English) that there has to be such strict word order, that's a chicken and egg question I suppose.

I hope you don't think I'm complaining about the language. Well, I suppose I'm sort of complaining about the arduous task of having to learn such a difficult language, but that's all part of it.

But certainly, isn't a word like vzcvrnkls worth sharing?

It's almost as good as that anecdote about that American businessman who was in the elevator with a bunch of Filipinos, somewhere in Manila. And as the elevator kept stopping at every floor, every time the doors opened, a person about to get in the elevator would ask the elevator operator:

Bababa ba?

To which the operator would say, Bababa.

And this precise exchange happened on every floor.

Passenger getting on: Bababa ba?

Elevator Operator: Bababa.

The American was astounded that Filipinos could communicate with only two letters. Haha!

Of course, if you're a Tagalog speaker, you know that the passengers were just asking if the elevator was going down, and that the operator was saying that yes, it was going down.

In fact, if you're a Filipino, you've probably already heard that joke before :)

I don't know if I told it well, but I thought it was a nice cap off to my brief tale about strange clusters of consonants in the Czech language.