58-700: Loket Castle ( Czech : Hrad Loket , German : Burg Elbogen ) is a 12th-century Gothic castle in Loket in the Karlovy Vary Region of the Czech Republic . It ls located on a massive rock, surrounded on three sides by the Ohře river. Once known as "the Impregnable Castle of Bohemia", because of its thick walls, it is one of the oldest stone castles in the country. It is administered by
116-663: A 1234 deed when the first known royal Loket burgrave was recorded. According to archeological investigations, the foundation of the stone castle dates back to the third quarter of the 12th century, during the reign of Přemysl Otakar I , either by the Czech Prince Vladislav I, later the Czech King Vladislaus II of Bohemia , or by ministerial officials to the Emperor Fridrich I Barbarosa . The old romanesque castle comprised two towers,
174-462: A Romanesque prismatic tower, the 15th-century burgrave's house and the captain's house, and a 16th-century palace with two wings and fortifications incorporating strongholds. Built in romanesque style, it was finally set up into its present appearance to serve as the town museum in 1907. After recent reconstructions the museum of locally-made porcelain has been re-opened to the public on the first floor. Later, exhibitions were also held in other rooms in
232-588: A cellar with one tiny window. As an adult and an important European ruler, Charles IV did not come to hate Loket and often stayed there. In his unimplemented code Maiestas Carolina , he classified Loket among the places which should have stayed in permanent property of the Czech crown. The Hussite Wars did not avoid Loket when it found itself in the hands of the supporter of the Catholic Church burgrave Půta of Illburk. The Hussite troops tried twice to conquer
290-411: A church and a building standing on the site of the present Margrave's House. The church stood beneath the present castle where St. Wenceslaus church is standing today. The other tower, no longer existent, stood to the north-east of the castle. Above all, the castle served as protection to the merchant's path leading from Prague through Cheb and on to Plauen and Erfurt , but after the re-annexation by
348-635: A distinction between phonemic /l/ and /ʎ/ which survives in Slovak. With the beginning of the national revival of the mid-18th century, Czech historians began to emphasize their people's accomplishments from the 15th through 17th centuries, rebelling against the Counter-Reformation (the Habsburg re-catholization efforts which had denigrated Czech and other non- Latin languages). Czech philologists studied sixteenth-century texts and advocated
406-506: A dozen additional counties in Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, North Dakota and Minnesota . As of 2009, 70,500 Americans spoke Czech as their first language (49th place nationwide, after Turkish and before Swedish ). Standard Czech contains ten basic vowel phonemes , and three diphthongs. The vowels are /a/, /ɛ/, /ɪ/, /o/, and /u/ , and their long counterparts /aː/, /ɛː/, /iː/, /oː/ and /uː/ . The diphthongs are /ou̯/, /au̯/ and /ɛu̯/ ;
464-571: A more-restricted distinction between "hard" and "soft" consonants (see Phonology below). The term "Old Czech" is applied to the period predating the 16th century, with the earliest records of the high medieval period also classified as "early Old Czech", but the term "Medieval Czech" is also used. The function of the written language was initially performed by Old Slavonic written in Glagolitic , later by Latin written in Latin script . Around
522-399: A peripheral wall of about 75 to 80 centimetres (30 to 31 in) thick and stood alone until 1966 when it was discovered. It probably originated at the end of the 12th century because the complete building concept of a Romanesque castle would otherwise have been an exception in the concept of Premyslid castles of the 12th century. It needs to be added that even historians do not agree whether
580-514: A realistic chance of returning as a major language. However, Josef Jungmann and other revivalists used Dobrovský's book to advocate for a Czech linguistic revival. Changes during this time included spelling reform (notably, í in place of the former j and j in place of g ), the use of t (rather than ti ) to end infinitive verbs and the non-capitalization of nouns (which had been a late borrowing from German). These changes differentiated Czech from Slovak. Modern scholars disagree about whether
638-489: A slow rise from low to high, quickly dropping to low on the last word or phrase. In modern Czech syntax, adjectives precede nouns, with few exceptions. Relative clauses are introduced by relativizers such as the adjective který , analogous to the English relative pronouns "which", "that" and "who"/"whom". As with other adjectives, it agrees with its associated noun in gender, number and case. Relative clauses follow
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#1732791510333696-474: A verb; information about its subject is encoded in the verb. Enclitics (primarily auxiliary verbs and pronouns) appear in the second syntactic slot of a sentence, after the first stressed unit. The first slot can contain a subject or object, a main form of a verb, an adverb, or a conjunction (except for the light conjunctions a , "and", i , "and even" or ale , "but"). Czech syntax has a subject–verb–object sentence structure. In practice, however, word order
754-690: Is a West Slavic language of the Czech–Slovak group , written in Latin script . Spoken by over 12 million people including second language speakers, it serves as the official language of the Czech Republic . Czech is closely related to Slovak , to the point of high mutual intelligibility , as well as to Polish to a lesser degree. Czech is a fusional language with a rich system of morphology and relatively flexible word order . Its vocabulary has been extensively influenced by Latin and German . The Czech–Slovak group developed within West Slavic in
812-636: Is a member of the West Slavic sub-branch of the Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. This branch includes Polish , Kashubian , Upper and Lower Sorbian and Slovak . Slovak is the most closely related language to Czech, followed by Polish and Silesian . The West Slavic languages are spoken in Central Europe. Czech is distinguished from other West Slavic languages by
870-634: Is a recognized minority language in Slovakia, Slovak citizens who speak only Czech may communicate with the government in their language in the same way that Slovak speakers in the Czech Republic also do. Immigration of Czechs from Europe to the United States occurred primarily from 1848 to 1914. Czech is a Less Commonly Taught Language in U.S. schools, and is taught at Czech heritage centers. Large communities of Czech Americans live in
928-422: Is also relevant to the declension patterns of nouns, which vary according to whether the final consonant of the noun stem is hard or soft. Voiced consonants with unvoiced counterparts are unvoiced at the end of a word before a pause, and in consonant clusters voicing assimilation occurs, which matches voicing to the following consonant. The unvoiced counterpart of /ɦ/ is /x/. The phoneme represented by
986-432: Is flexible and used to distinguish topic and focus , with the topic or theme (known referents) preceding the focus or rheme (new information) in a sentence; Czech has therefore been described as a topic-prominent language . Although Czech has a periphrastic passive construction (like English), in colloquial style, word-order changes frequently replace the passive voice. For example, to change "Peter killed Paul" to "Paul
1044-629: Is one of the EU's official languages and the 2012 Eurobarometer survey found that Czech was the foreign language most often used in Slovakia. Economist Jonathan van Parys collected data on language knowledge in Europe for the 2012 European Day of Languages . The five countries with the greatest use of Czech were the Czech Republic (98.77 percent), Slovakia (24.86 percent), Portugal (1.93 percent), Poland (0.98 percent) and Germany (0.47 percent). Czech speakers in Slovakia primarily live in cities. Since it
1102-575: Is realized as its voiceless allophone [r̝̊], a sound somewhere between Czech r and š . The consonants /r/, /l/, and /m/ can be syllabic , acting as syllable nuclei in place of a vowel. Strč prst skrz krk ("Stick [your] finger through [your] throat") is a well-known Czech tongue twister using syllabic consonants but no vowels. Each word has primary stress on its first syllable , except for enclitics (minor, monosyllabic, unstressed syllables). In all words of more than two syllables, every odd-numbered syllable receives secondary stress. Stress
1160-499: Is unrelated to vowel length; both long and short vowels can be stressed or unstressed. Vowels are never reduced in tone (e.g. to schwa sounds) when unstressed. When a noun is preceded by a monosyllabic preposition, the stress usually moves to the preposition, e.g. do Prahy "to Prague". Czech grammar, like that of other Slavic languages, is fusional ; its nouns, verbs, and adjectives are inflected by phonological processes to modify their meanings and grammatical functions, and
1218-734: The Battle of the White Mountain , the Loket citizens allowed the Mansfeld detachments to enter the town. In 1621 the town was besieged by the Bavarians led by Tilly and after huge bombardment the town was forced to surrender and the Saxons had to leave. The town was then punished for disobedience by extensive repressive measures. This situation recurred again in 1631 when the burghers allowed
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#17327915103331276-681: The Kralice Bible between 1579 and 1593 (the first complete Czech translation of the Bible from the original languages) became very important for standardization of the Czech language in the following centuries as it was used as a model for the standard language. In 1615, the Bohemian diet tried to declare Czech to be the only official language of the kingdom. After the Bohemian Revolt (of predominantly Protestant aristocracy) which
1334-622: The Leskovec-Dresden Bible , also dates to this period. Old Czech texts, including poetry and cookbooks, were also produced outside universities. Literary activity becomes widespread in the early 15th century in the context of the Bohemian Reformation . Jan Hus contributed significantly to the standardization of Czech orthography , advocated for widespread literacy among Czech commoners (particularly in religion) and made early efforts to model written Czech after
1392-455: The Saxons to enter and conquered the town. Swedish troops operating in Loket neighbourhood excluded the town from their attacks, but The Thirty Years' War and the repressive measures by imperial officials brought great economic losses to the town of Loket. In 1725 the castle was burned down and only the ground floor and the underground of the castle remained. In the beginning of the 19th century
1450-742: The high medieval period, and the standardization of Czech and Slovak within the Czech–Slovak dialect continuum emerged in the early modern period. In the later 18th to mid-19th century, the modern written standard became codified in the context of the Czech National Revival . The most widely spoken non-standard variety , known as Common Czech, is based on the vernacular of Prague , but is now spoken as an interdialect throughout most of Bohemia . The Moravian dialects spoken in Moravia and Czech Silesia are considerably more varied than
1508-406: The voiced velar fricative consonant (/ɣ/) and consistent stress on the first syllable. The Bohemian (Czech) language is first recorded in writing in glosses and short notes during the 12th to 13th centuries. Literary works written in Czech appear in the late 13th and early 14th century and administrative documents first appear towards the late 14th century. The first complete Bible translation ,
1566-528: The 7th century, the Slavic expansion reached Central Europe, settling on the eastern fringes of the Frankish Empire . The West Slavic polity of Great Moravia formed by the 9th century. The Christianization of Bohemia took place during the 9th and 10th centuries. The diversification of the Czech-Slovak group within West Slavic began around that time, marked among other things by its use of
1624-407: The Czech state it began functioning as a frontier fortress . By this time it became the new administrative centre of the region. By the turn of the 13th century a settlement was built around the castle walls and later raised into a royal town. From the 1250s the castle was gradually enlarged and the formerly Romanesque building turned into a Gothic stronghold which was often visited by the members of
1682-473: The House of slik divided itself into several branches – Falknov , Jáchymov and Ostrov . Its architecture followed the spirit of the late Gothic and the new-coming Renaissance. The Sliks changed the southern palace into a great hall, and the eastern palace into the "Slik Archives". The castle suffered from being converted into a prison in the 19th century. During the 16th century the House of Slik became one of
1740-481: The Loket Castle Foundation since 1993 and preserved today as a museum and national monument. Loket, originally called Stein-Elbogen due to its rocky location, is said to have been founded in 870 by the margraves of Vohenburg who were then related to the dukes of Bavaria to whom the entire Elbogen districts belonged until the 12th century. The first written mention of Loket as a town comes from
1798-522: The Margrave's House was then rebuilt and a museum of porcelain established. In 1788 a proposal for the reconstruction of the castle into a town prison was put forward, and the work was finished in 1822. During that time a palace called the Stone Chamber in the vicinity of the tower was pulled down and other buildings were lowered by one storey. The prison was abolished in 1948. Since 1968 the castle
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1856-403: The Margrave's House where an exhibition of porcelain is on display and the remains of a Romanesque rotunda , the smallest of its type in the Czech Republic, the castle also features the prison cells and the chamber of torture, the wedding and the ceremonial hall, the historical arms and Archeological hall, where a maquette of the so-called "bewitched burgrave" Elbogen meteorite is on display,
1914-454: The castle under the leadership of Krušina of Švamberk and later under the leadership of Jakoubek of Vřesovice, but both crusades ended without success. The comprehensive restoration of the castle under Wenceslaus IV was decisive for its present form. Of the original Romanesque buildings, those preserved were mainly the extremely rare rotunda, the foundations of the castle tower and those of the northern palace. The Margave's House also originated in
1972-458: The castle was the work of the Schtauf or Premyslid architecture. The Baroque cathedral was erected on the site of the original Gothic church, which was burned down in 1725. The new church was completed in 1734, to a design by Wolfgang Braubock. The altar paintings are attributed to Petr Brandl, and both the valuable side altars were probably the work of the Loket sculptor Jan Wild. When the church
2030-405: The castle with a trick when he persuaded the guard to open the gate pretending a friendly visit to his wife. Queen Eliška was taken prisoner and transported to Mělník , the dowry castle of the Czech queens. Their three-year-old son Prince Václav, later Emperor and King Charles IV , was held here for two months in the underground prison, a period which he later described as a horrible imprisonment in
2088-428: The castle. From 1551 to 1562 the castle was administered by the nobility of Plauen, but it was taken from them because of poor administration and conferred to the Loket burghers. In 1598 it became a hereditary legacy to the burghers, serving for administrative purposes only. Every time the town hall faced a disastrous condition the town aldermen held their sessions there. In 1607 the nobleman Jiří Popel of Lobkovic , who
2146-496: The castle. Several tombstones are arranged in a row by the entrance to the building. One of them coming from rabbi Benjamin's Renaissance tomb from the extinct Jewish cemetery, which was situated on the Robičské suburb, with a laudatory poem dating approximately of 1700, while the others come from the former Loket cemetery at St. John's Church. During the archeological research in spring 1993, many fragments as well as other materials from
2204-434: The conservative revivalists were motivated by nationalism or considered contemporary spoken Czech unsuitable for formal, widespread use. Adherence to historical patterns was later relaxed and standard Czech adopted a number of features from Common Czech (a widespread informal interdialectal variety), such as leaving some proper nouns undeclined. This has resulted in a relatively high level of homogeneity among all varieties of
2262-427: The dialects of Bohemia. Czech has a moderately-sized phoneme inventory, comprising ten monophthongs , three diphthongs and 25 consonants (divided into "hard", "neutral" and "soft" categories). Words may contain complicated consonant clusters or lack vowels altogether. Czech has a raised alveolar trill , which is known to occur as a phoneme in only a few other languages, represented by the grapheme ř . Czech
2320-405: The easily separable affixes characteristic of agglutinative languages are limited. Czech inflects for case, gender and number in nouns and tense, aspect, mood , person and subject number and gender in verbs. Parts of speech include adjectives, adverbs , numbers, interrogative words , prepositions , conjunctions and interjections . Adverbs are primarily formed from adjectives by taking
2378-477: The final ý or í of the base form and replacing it with e , ě , y , or o . Negative statements are formed by adding the affix ne- to the main verb of a clause, with one exception: je (he, she or it is) becomes není . Because Czech uses grammatical case to convey word function in a sentence (instead of relying on word order , as English does), its word order is flexible. As a pro-drop language , in Czech an intransitive sentence can consist of only
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2436-494: The language. Czech is spoken by about 10 million residents of the Czech Republic . A Eurobarometer survey conducted from January to March 2012 found that the first language of 98 percent of Czech citizens was Czech, the third-highest proportion of a population in the European Union (behind Greece and Hungary ). As the official language of the Czech Republic (a member of the European Union since 2004), Czech
2494-844: The last two are found only in loanwords such as auto "car" and euro "euro". In Czech orthography, the vowels are spelled as follows: The letter ⟨ ě ⟩ indicates that the previous consonant is palatalized (e.g. něco /ɲɛt͡so/ ). After a labial it represents /jɛ/ (e.g. běs /bjɛs/ ); but ⟨mě⟩ is pronounced /mɲɛ/, cf. měkký ( /mɲɛkiː/ ). The consonant phonemes of Czech and their equivalent letters in Czech orthography are as follows: Czech consonants are categorized as "hard", "neutral", or "soft": Hard consonants may not be followed by i or í in writing, or soft ones by y or ý (except in loanwords such as kilogram ). Neutral consonants may take either character. Hard consonants are sometimes known as "strong", and soft ones as "weak". This distinction
2552-504: The letter ř (capital Ř ) is very rare among languages and often claimed to be unique to Czech, though it also occurs in some dialects of Kashubian , and formerly occurred in Polish. It represents the raised alveolar non-sonorant trill ( IPA : [r̝] ), a sound somewhere between Czech r and ž (example: "řeka" (river) ), and is present in Dvořák . In unvoiced environments, /r̝/
2610-479: The palace from the times of the castle reconstruction during the reign of King Wenceslas and the remains of a Renaissance kitchen dating back to 1528–1536 were also found. In the corner a rectangular foundation for a heating element is also noticeable next to a worn-away stone threshold. The rotunda, originally hidden in the body of a spiral staircase in the northern part of the castle, indicates its Slavs origin. It has an inner diameter of 3.6 metres (12 ft) with
2668-456: The reign of Wenceslaus IV. The castle continued to be enlarged up to the 1420s and in 1434 it was mortgaged to chancellor Kašpar Slik by Sigismund of Luxembourg as a reward for his financial aid. Further reconstruction took place in the second half of the 15th century when the castle was turned into a representative ancestral seat under the administration of the House of Slik, which lasted for more than 100 years. It served this purpose even after
2726-582: The return of the language to high culture . This period is known as the Czech National Revival (or Renaissance). During the national revival, in 1809 linguist and historian Josef Dobrovský released a German-language grammar of Old Czech entitled Ausführliches Lehrgebäude der böhmischen Sprache ('Comprehensive Doctrine of the Bohemian Language'). Dobrovský had intended his book to be descriptive , and did not think Czech had
2784-401: The royal family. Under the rule of Přemysl Otakar II a new fortification wall with half-cylindrical towers was constructed. Queen Eliška Přemyslovna used to hide herself in the castle with her children during the upheavals against John of Luxembourg as well as to protect herself against his anger. The last time she had to hide there was in the early spring of 1319, when King John conquered
2842-441: The spoken language. There was no standardization distinguishing between Czech and Slovak prior to the 15th century. In the 16th century, the division between Czech and Slovak becomes apparent, marking the confessional division between Lutheran Protestants in Slovakia using Czech orthography and Catholics, especially Slovak Jesuits, beginning to use a separate Slovak orthography based on Western Slovak dialects. The publication of
2900-465: The states of Texas , Nebraska and Wisconsin . In the 2000 United States Census , Czech was reported as the most common language spoken at home (besides English ) in Valley , Butler and Saunders Counties , Nebraska and Republic County, Kansas . With the exception of Spanish (the non-English language most commonly spoken at home nationwide), Czech was the most common home language in more than
2958-401: The time of the many reconstruction periods in the Loket castle were found. The masonry of the original Romanesque rampart from before 1230, when the castle was built, was then uncovered. The walls are 2.2 by 2.5 metres (7.2 by 8.2 ft) thick. They are based directly on the rock and are built entirely of quarry stone. In the upper part of the excavation, below the main window, the walls of
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#17327915103333016-424: The upper classes. Modern standard Czech originates in standardization efforts of the 18th century. By then the language had developed a literary tradition, and since then it has changed little; journals from that period contain no substantial differences from modern standard Czech, and contemporary Czechs can understand them with little difficulty. At some point before the 18th century, the Czech language abandoned
3074-409: The wealthiest families in the country and the most powerful in the region. Their era in the Loket castle was one of disputes with the Loket burghers, which often led to acts of violence and open conflict. Due to their participation in the revolt of the Czech states against the king, later Emperor Ferdinand I Habsburg , many of the possessions of the House of Slik were confiscated and eventually they lost
3132-564: Was administered by the Ancient Monuments Departments in Plzeň . The turning point for the improvement and opening up of the castle came in 1992 when it was returned to the town of Loket once again. The town founded the Loket Castle Foundation which was later transformed into a common welfare corporation. The castle today is divided into nine different parts containing many medieval artefacts of historical interest. Besides
3190-686: Was defeated by the Habsburgs in 1620, the Protestant intellectuals had to leave the country. This emigration together with other consequences of the Thirty Years' War had a negative impact on the further use of the Czech language. In 1627, Czech and German became official languages of the Kingdom of Bohemia and in the 18th century German became dominant in Bohemia and Moravia, especially among
3248-529: Was killed by Peter" the order of subject and object is inverted: Petr zabil Pavla ("Peter killed Paul") becomes "Paul, Peter killed" ( Pavla zabil Petr ). Pavla is in the accusative case , the grammatical object of the verb. A word at the end of a clause is typically emphasized, unless an upward intonation indicates that the sentence is a question: In parts of Bohemia (including Prague ), questions such as Jí pes bagetu? without an interrogative word (such as co , "what" or kdo , "who") are intoned in
3306-642: Was reconstructed, the old churchyard behind the presbytery was restored. A monument to Lord Václav Popel of Lobkovice, imprisoned in Loket and buried in the church crypt, was erected here. The town centre and castle were both used as locations in the 2006 film Casino Royale , representing a town in Montenegro . Czech language Czech ( / tʃ ɛ k / CHEK ; endonym : čeština [ˈtʃɛʃcɪna] ), historically also known as Bohemian ( / b oʊ ˈ h iː m i ə n , b ə -/ boh- HEE -mee-ən, bə- ; Latin : lingua Bohemica ),
3364-511: Was the highest controller of the Czech kingdom, died of an apoplectic stroke in the loket castle jail. He had been accused of treason and imprisoned in Kladsko for many years. Later he was buried on the site of a former church tower. During the Thirty Years' War the town was afflicted with numerous disasters. At its beginning, Protestant Loket supported the opposition against the Emperor. After
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