Czech and English: Between Interference and Influence
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The paper deals with the influence of English on the Czech language. The contact between the two languages – and their reflection by Czech scholars and the society – will be briefly characterized. The paper will then document the typical route of a word, idiom, phrase, or grammatical pattern from an unwelcome anglicism, corrected by school teachers, to acceptance limited to a particular register or social group, to a complete inclusion in the language system. Only a tiny proportion of the “candidates” reach the third stage, and the reasons are unclear. The perceived borderline between an error and an innovation will be discussed and documented using examples from older and recent loans and calques. For the lexical part, the paper will use insights from work on updating the dictionary of false cognates between English and Czech, a book last published in 1990, just before the big wave of English influence. Its author included about 1600 entries, while other sources usually list no more than a few dozen false cognates. Even so, substantial additions to the dictionary are necessary. Working on the revision provides an opportunity to observe the shifts in how the listed word pairs are perceived today and what new false cognates have emerged. In addition to this partial inventory of lexical influences, the paper will consider how such a lexicon can be offered as an aid to translators, especially in the era of CAT and NMT, and to what degree translation practice itself influences its development. |
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