49-455: The Operation Anthropoid Memorial ( Czech : Památník Operace Anthropoid ) is a monument in Libeň , Prague that commemorates Operation Anthropoid , an ambush on senior Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich by Czechoslovakian partisans on 27 May 1942 which resulted in his death one week later. Operation Anthropoid had never served as the basis of a sculpture or public work of art. On 14 April 2008
98-458: A basic element of the finished composition. It was incorporated into the design of the central column, which, being triangular in cross-section, corresponds to the equilateral triangle in the Czech flag. This simplification was necessitated by the somewhat awkward shape of the memorial site. The central column was clad in corten, a form of weathered steel, symbolizing the destruction of Czech statehood and
147-617: 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
196-501: 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/ ;
245-561: 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
294-514: 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
343-484: 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
392-665: A tribute to the virtues embodied in the Czechoslovak military tradition – a commitment to one's oath of duty, and to defending one’s nation even at the cost of one's own life. Twenty proposals were submitted. On 27 May 2008, the anniversary of the Operation Anthropoid, a proposal was chosen. The authors of the winning proposal were artists David Moješčík and Michal Šmeral, and architects Miroslava Tůmová and Jiří Gulbis. Moješčík and Šmeral had previously collaborated on various projects in connection with " public art ". The memorial
441-474: 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
490-740: 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
539-612: 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
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#1733092893642588-615: 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
637-422: 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
686-432: 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
735-622: 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
784-575: 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
833-419: Is still a junction in the same place, it is formed by V Holešovičkách and two access ramps of the surrounding traffic interchange, the three roads together forming a triangular traffic island inside the hairpin turn where Kirchmayerova třída formerly intersected V Holešovičkách . Because the memorial was to be located amidst several busy thoroughfares, its most numerous and frequent observers would be
882-499: 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
931-658: 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
980-603: 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
1029-756: The Resistance in German-occupied Czechoslovakia who took part in the firefight during the aftermath of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš , code named Operation Anthropoid . SS - Obergruppenführer Heydrich, a high-ranking German Nazi official, was chief of the Reich Security Main Office and one of the main architects of the Holocaust . He was also Stellvertretender Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia in 1942. The Germans were unable to locate
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#17330928936421078-727: 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
1127-406: 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 ,
1176-515: 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
1225-460: The Prague 8 city district announced its intention to hold a one-round competition, open to the public, for the design of a memorial to Operation Anthropoid and to Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík . One of the chief design requirements for the memorial was that it should not merely commemorate one of the most successful actions of the Czechoslovak resistance during World War II, but that it should also serve as
1274-401: The artists worked on it, the "Vitruvian Man" was the original basis of the figures surmounting the sculpture's central column and remained the memorial's chief design element from its conception to its completion. One of the initial concepts for the memorial involved the use of a stone block to represent the Czech flag. This early conception then went through various iterations, in which the block
1323-601: The attackers until Karel Čurda of the " Out Distance " sabotage group turned himself in to the Gestapo and gave them the names of the team's local contacts for the reward of one million Reichsmarks . Valčík and the others died after a six-hour firefight with Waffen-SS troops and German police in the Saints Cyril and Methodius Cathedral . 14 members of Valčík's family were arrested, brought to Mauthausen concentration camp and executed. This Czechoslovakia -related article
1372-434: 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
1421-418: The design was Leonardo da Vinci 's 1490 drawing " Vitruvian Man "; from which is derived the "Vitruvian Cross", illustrating the proportions of the human body. The stance of the depicted man as a generalization of the human physique is therefore an allusion to the very name "Operation Anthropoid", as "anthropoid" means "human in form or appearance". Although the memorial's design underwent a constant evolution as
1470-427: 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
1519-405: 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
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1568-477: 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
1617-487: 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
1666-844: 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
1715-500: 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/
1764-434: The noun they modify. The following is a glossed example: Chc-i want- 1SG navštív-it visit- INF universit-u, university- SG . ACC , na on kter-ou which- SG . F . ACC chod-í attend- 3SG Josef Val%C4%8D%C3%ADk Josef Valčík ( pronounced [ˈjozɛv ˈval̩tʃiːk] ; 2 November 1914 – 18 June 1942) was a Czechoslovak British-trained soldier and member of
1813-419: The occupants of passing vehicles; this therefore became a very important factor in determining the proper scale for the memorial. The area surrounding the base of the sculpture has been designed so that the memorial integrates with the existing features of the parterre in a very natural manner. This area now consists of long, narrow concrete slabs, separated by narrow strips of earth, allowing grass to grow between
1862-564: 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
1911-773: The sacrifices made by the participants in Operation Anthropoid, as well as those who may gather for any solemn occasion. Streets immediately to the west of the memorial site are now named after Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, who carried out the ambush, and Josef Valčík , who acted as lookout and died alongside them in Saints Cyril and Methodius Cathedral . 50°07′04″N 14°27′55″E / 50.11784°N 14.46519°E / 50.11784; 14.46519 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 ),
1960-436: The slabs. The greenery bursting through the concrete slabs not only integrates the memorial into the site, but also emphasises the vital spirit of the memorial and the events it commemorates. There is a memorial plaque directly in front of the sculpture. The whole composition escalates towards the sculpture. The ample space offered by this design enables the site to serve as a dignified gathering place for those wishing to remember
2009-441: 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
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2058-461: 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
2107-459: The subjugation of the entire nation. After being exposed to the weather for several years the corten will form a stable, rust-like appearance. As envisioned in the initial drafts the column is surmounted by three Vitruvian figures, each standing on an edge of the column and facing outward. The assassination took place in Prague 8, at a hairpin turn created by the junction of Kirchmayerova třída (Avenue) and V Holešovičkách (Avenue). This site
2156-424: 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
2205-410: Was chosen because the hairpin turn required Heydrich's driver to slow down when negotiating this turn, thereby creating a favorable opportunity for an ambush. The actual site of the assassination was the site chosen for the memorial. In the intervening years, the local geography has greatly changed. Kirchmayerova třída , now named Zenklova , no longer intersects V Holešovičkách . Although there
2254-659: 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
2303-564: Was first divided into the three geometrical shapes composing the Czech flag, and was then, in a subsequent design, merged with the shape of a "Czech hedgehog" - an anti-tank obstacle most familiar to English-speakers from its use by the Germans on the beaches of Normandy but invented in Czechoslovakia and used throughout Europe in World War II. The flag motif, though eventually simplified, remained
2352-529: 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
2401-408: Was to be located on the actual site of the assassination. Work on the memorial began immediately thereafter. On 27 May 2009 at 10:35 a.m. – the exact time of the assassination – a celebratory unveiling of the completed memorial was held. The figures are manufactured from bronze cast from a clay-modelled statue. The column is made of welded steel enclosed by corten steel . The starting point for
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