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60-447: The Länderbank , full original name k. k. privilegierte Österreichische Länderbank ( lit.   ' Imperial and Royal Privileged Austrian Bank of the Lands ' ), was a major Austrian bank, created in 1880. In 1922 its head office was moved to Paris under the name Banque des Pays de l'Europe Centrale ( BPEC , German : Zentral-Europäische Länderbank , lit.   ' Bank of

120-534: A Vienna-based bank established in 1870 which had come under majority control of Danatbank , then Dresdner Bank in 1931. The Prague-based Živnostenská Banka 's Austrian subsidiary was simultaneously subsumed in the merged entity, renamed Länderbank Wien AG . The new Länderbank had 33 branch offices in Vienna (36 after acquisition of the Austrian business of Società Italiana di Credito in 1939), in comparison to 24 for

180-588: A capital increase open to foreign investors. In 1991, after facing renewed financial difficulty, the Länderbank, by then Austria's fourth-largest financial institution, merged with Vienna's Zentralsparkasse und Kommerzialbank Wien (est. 1905, also known as Z-Bank) which at the time was both sounder and larger. In practice, that represented a takeover by the City of Vienna, led by Zentralsparkasse general manager René Alfons Haiden  [ de ] who subsequently chaired

240-617: 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

300-501: 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/ ;

360-561: 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

420-514: 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

480-738: A significant institution, financing Austrian industrial projects and the early development of the newly established neighboring countries in the Balkans . Together with the Bank of Hungarian Lands, it was involved in the foundation of the Banque de Salonique in 1886-1888. It also developed a branch network in Austria-Hungary, starting with Prague in 1894 in cooperative relationship with the Böhmische Union Bank . By 1904 it had 15 branch locations in Vienna, 9 in

540-484: 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

600-507: A subsidiary of UniCredit since 2005. The Länderbank was founded on 11 November 1880 as a part-owned subsidiary of Paris-based Union Générale , first chaired by Galician aristocrat Ludwik Wodzicki  [ pl ] . Union Generale's promoter Paul Eugène Bontoux  [ fr ] intended it as a conservative Catholic project against the financial power of the Jewish Rothschild family which led Austria-Hungary's largest bank,

660-474: 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

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720-740: 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

780-612: 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

840-615: 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

900-422: 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

960-432: 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

1020-622: 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

1080-575: 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

1140-499: 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

1200-534: The Austrian People's Party . In 1956, the state floated 40 percent of its share capital for purchase by Austrian nationals. That same year, the Länderbank had 21 branches in Vienna and 12 in other Austrian cities, namely Baden bei Wien , Bludenz , Bregenz , Graz , Innsbruck , Klosterneuburg , Linz , Salzburg , Sankt Pölten , Villach , Wels , Wiener Neustadt , as well as a subsidiary in Eisenstadt . In 1976,

1260-603: The Creditanstalt . In 1881 it sponsored an affiliate in Hungary, the Bank of the Hungarian Lands ( German : Ungarische Länderbank , Hungarian : Magyar Országos Bank ; sometimes also referred to as Ungarische Landesbank ), which however collapsed in 1887. The Union Générale itself failed in a spectacular financial scandal in 1882, and the fledgling Länderbank was taken over by Austrian interests. It soon expanded to become

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1320-706: 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

1380-603: 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

1440-727: 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

1500-406: 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 ,

1560-515: 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

1620-477: The Central European Countries ' ), even though its activity remained overwhelmingly in the Austrian operations. After the 1938 Anschluss the latter came under control of Dresdner Bank by the name Länderbank Wien . It was nationalized in 1946, renamed Österreichische Länderbank AG in 1948, and eventually merged in 1991 with Vienna's Zentralsparkasse to form Bank Austria , which in turn has been

1680-610: The Commercial & Industrial Bank ( Czech : Banka pro obchod a průmysl , German : Bank für Handel und Industrie , French : Banque du Commerce et de l’Industrie ), chaired by diplomat Jules Cambon . Its Galician affiliate was renamed Powszechny Bank Kredytowy ( German : Allgemeine Kreditbank ) in 1919, and moved its head office to Warsaw in 1926. In 1927, the Austrian branch changed its name from Zentraleuropäische Länderbank to Österreichische Länderbank . The French investors' support kept it strong enough to survive

1740-716: The Creditanstalt (21) and second only to the Wiener Bankverein (49). By 1913, 31.4 percent of the Länderbank's capital was held by French and German shareholders, making it more internationalized than either the Creditanstalt (17.8 percent) or the Bankverein (18.3 percent). In 1914, the Länderbank's branches in Paris and London were confiscated immediately after the start of World War I , as were its operations in Serbia and Romania . In

1800-915: The Habsburg Monarchy retained the German abbreviation or used it interchangeably with their own − c. i kr. in Croatian , c. a k. or c.-k. in Czech , cs. és kir. in Hungarian , I.R. in Italian , c. i k. or C.K. in Polish , often hyphenated ( cezaro-crăiesc ) in Romanian , c. a k. in Slovak , c. kr. in Slovenian . The abbreviation k.k. gave rise to

1860-502: The Habsburg monarch reigned simultaneously as the K aiser ( Emperor of Austria ) and as the K önig ( King of Hungary ), while the two territories were joined in a real union (akin to a two-state federation in this instance). The acts of the common government, which was responsible only for the Imperial & Royal ("I&R") Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the I&;R Ministry of War and

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1920-516: The I&R Ministry of Finance (financing only the two other ministries), were carried out in the name of "His Imperial and Royal Majesty", and the central governmental bodies had their names prefixed with k. u. k. Before 1867, the territories under the control of the Habsburg monarch in Vienna used kaiserlich und königlich or the hyphenated kaiserlich-königlich interchangeably. Neither of

1980-533: The Länderbank again opened an office in London, followed by New York in 1977. After the bank suffered from poor risk management in the late 1970s, future chancellor Franz Vranitzky led its recovery as chairman of its management board from 1981 to 1984, with the help of government subsidies. In 1985, it was the first Austrian bank to open an office in China . The state's ownership stake was reduced to 51 percent in 1988, through

2040-849: The capital, was the ninth-largest private-sector bank in Poland. It also retained controlling interests in the Prague-based Commercial & Industrial Bank as well as the Hungarian Discount and Exchange Bank in Budapest and Banca de Credit Român  [ ro ] ( German : Rumänische Kreditbank ) in Bucharest . Following the Nazi Anschluss in 1938, the Länderbank came under considerable financial and political pressure, and on 15 June 1938 agreed under duress to be acquired by Mercurbank ,

2100-434: 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

2160-668: The crisis of 1929-1932 without Austrian government help, unlike most domestic banks including the Allgemeine Bodencreditanstalt , Creditanstalt , Niederösterreichische Escompte-Gesellschaft , and Wiener Bankverein . Even so, it had to suspend all dividend payments from 1930 to 1935. By 1936, 85 percent of the BPEC's business was made in Austria. That same year, the Powszechny Bank Kredytowy , of which it held 58 percent of

2220-427: 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

2280-405: 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

2340-477: 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

2400-623: The financial turmoil that followed the end of World War I in Austria, the Länderbank was recapitalized by a group of French investors led by the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas , in liaison with the Bank of England . On 22 January 1922, a vote of its General Meeting transferred the bank's head office and board of directors from Vienna to Paris , at 12 rue de Castiglione, and it was renamed the Banque des Pays de l'Europe Centrale . Its former branch in Prague became

2460-487: 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

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2520-844: 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

2580-500: 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/

2640-518: The merged entity, renamed Bank Austria , until 1995. Bank Austria was acquired by HypoVereinsbank in 2001, which in turn was purchased by UniCredit in 2005. The Länderbank had its first temporary offices in a commercial building at Löwelstrasse 18 (which later became the seat of the Social Democratic Party of Austria ). It erected its own head office  [ de ] in 1883–1884 on plans by famed Viennese architect Otto Wagner , on

2700-603: The new autonomous status of the kingdom within the Habsburg lands. Use of the phrase Kaiserlich und königlich was decreed in a letter written by the Emperor on October 17, 1889 for the military, the navy and the institutions shared by both parts of the empire. Subsequently, the abbreviation k.k. only referred to the institutions of the "Austrian" part of Austria-Hungary ( Cisleithania ). The abbreviation m.k. ( Hungarian : magyar királyi ), or kgl. ung. (German: königlich ungarisch ), both meaning 'Royal Hungarian',

2760-707: The newly named Austrian Empire that the Habsburgs attributed so from 11 August 1804. The name "Imperial-Royal Army" was used from 1745, as "Royal" referred to the Apostolic Kingdom of Hungary, which was not part of the Holy Roman Empire , but under Habsburg rule. After the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 , the Hungarians insisted on the und ('and'), not the hyphen, in all usage in line with

2820-715: The noun Kakania (spelling out the letter K [kah] twice as well as reminiscent of caca in the Central European languages). It was intended to describe the Habsburg Monarchy as a state of mind, bureaucratic and with a highly stratified formal society. A discussion of Kakania became a highlight of the first volume of Robert Musil 's novel The Man Without Qualities (1930). 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 ),

2880-697: The rest of the Empire, and 2 abroad ( Paris opened in 1890, and London in 1903). Much of its activity remained connected with the city of Vienna led since 1897 by Karl Lueger , of which it became the main financer in 1908. In 1910, it sponsored the creation of the Galician People's Bank for Agriculture and Trade ( German : Galizische Volksbank für Landwirtschaft und Handel , Polish : Galicyjski Bank Ludowy dla rolnictwa i handlu ) in Lemberg, now Lviv . By 1912, its network had further expanded to 31 branches, more than

2940-564: 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

3000-694: The rival Creditanstalt-Bankverein. Later in 1938 following the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland , it took over the former branches of the Böhmische Escompte-Bank in the South Moravian towns of Břeclav ( German : Lundenburg ), Mikulov ( German : Nikolsburg ) and Znojmo ( German : Znaim ). In subsequent years, most of the Länderbank's resources were used to finance the Nazi war effort. The Länderbank

3060-485: The site of a former armory . That work has been described as Vienna's first modern office building. The Länderbank remained there from 1884 until 1938, after which the building became a German military facility. Following the merger with Mercurbank, the Länderbank moved into the former head office of Niederösterreichische Escompte-Gesellschaft , am Hof 2, which in 1991 became the head office of Bank Austria . The Länderbank's Hungarian affiliate, Ungarische Landesbank ),

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3120-427: The spellings defined a hierarchy among the Habsburg dynastic kingdoms, principalities, duchies, and other bodies politic. The Habsburg monarchs ruled the kingdoms of Hungary , Croatia and Bohemia as their Kings. The title Emperor applied to their role as heads of the conglomerate of the mostly German states called the Holy Roman Empire until 1806. The same title, Emperor , came to identify their role as rulers of

3180-441: 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

3240-413: 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

3300-424: 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

3360-428: Was applied in reference to the governmental bodies of the Kingdom of Hungary ( Transleithania ). In official documents, the abbreviation used provides information on the lands targeted: The ubiquity of this phrase in all administrative matters made it a synonym for the Habsburg administration, sometimes referred to as the " k. u. k. monarchy" in Central European publications through the present. Other languages of

3420-401: 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

3480-527: Was established in Pest , initially at Palatingasse (now Nador Utca ) 9, then in a purpose-built head office nearby at No. 4 of the same street, designed by architect Adolf Feszty  [ hu ] with metalwork by Gyula Jungfer . That building later became the Budapest office of Wiener Bankverein . The Länderbank's Prague branch erected a prominent building in 1906 on Náměstí Republiky , more recently branded Konektor Place . Imperial and Royal During that period, it indicated that

3540-529: 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

3600-411: Was nationalized by law of 28 July 1946, in part to pre-empt impending confiscation by the Russian occupying forces as former German property. In the postwar period, it was widely viewed as belonging to the sphere of influence of the Social Democratic Party of Austria under Austria's Proporz arrangement. It long remained Austria's second-largest bank behind the Creditanstalt-Bankverein , associated with

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