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59-420: The Slav Epic ( Czech : Slovanská epopej ) is a cycle of 20 large canvases painted by Czech Art Nouveau painter Alphonse Mucha between 1910 and 1928. The cycle depicts the mythology and history of Czechs and other Slavic peoples . In 1928, after finishing his monumental work, Mucha bestowed the cycle upon the city of Prague on the condition that the city build a special pavilion for it. Prior to 2012,

118-607: A Jewish state in the Middle East. He was a passionate spokesman for the independence of the Arab states. From May and June 1918 he helped Tomas Masaryk meet with President Wilson to negotiate support for Czechoslovak legions in Russia and for the founding of a new independent Czechoslovak state. Crane was appointed United States Ambassador to China by President Wilson and served from March 22, 1920, to July 2, 1921. In 1925 Crane founded

177-451: A dinner, Ambassador Dodd heard Crane express admiration for Hitler and learned that Crane also had no objection to how the Nazis were treating Germany's Jews, telling Dodd: "Let Hitler have his way." In his biography of Crane, Norman E. Saul notes that he maintained relationships with prominent Jews such as Louis Brandeis and Lillian Wald and suggests that his “vague but open” anti-Semitism

236-617: 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

295-501: 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/ ;

354-709: A leading ornithologist whom Crane had met while visiting Boston . Crane and Cory shared an interest in baseball, and from 1888 to 1892, the pair funded and played on the Hyannis town team in what is now the Cape Cod Baseball League . At Cory and Crane's expense, various well-known professional and amateur players were brought in to play alongside the Hyannis locals. When Cory lost his family's fortune in 1906, Crane purchased Cory's vast collection of bird specimens and donated it to Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History with

413-429: A letter of congratulation that told him: The Jews, after winning the war, galloping along at a swift pace, getting Russia, England and Palestine, being caught in the act of trying to seize Germany, too, and meeting their first real rebuff, have gone plumb crazy and are deluging the world—particularly easy America—with anti-German propaganda. I strongly advise you to resist every social invitation. According to Larson, at

472-561: 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

531-417: A previous portrait of Josephine Crane Bradley as Slavia for the 100 koruna bill. President William Howard Taft appointed Crane minister to China on July 16, 1909, but on the eve of his departure to his post on October 4, 1909, he was recalled to Washington and forced to resign under pressure by US Secretary of State Philander C. Knox , who held him responsible for the publication in a Chicago newspaper of

590-514: 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

649-484: 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

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708-474: 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

767-740: 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

826-612: 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

885-615: 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

944-422: 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

1003-432: 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

1062-622: 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

1121-575: 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

1180-499: 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

1239-520: The King-Crane Commission . While the commission was originally proposed by the US to develop an international consensus on the future make up and status of postwar Middle East nations, the commission quickly became a US-only sponsored effort. With the appointment of Crane as co-head of the commission, it set about to issue a report to inform US policy makers. In respect to the creation of a Jewish state in

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1298-706: 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

1357-603: 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

1416-727: 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

1475-406: 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 ,

1534-515: 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

1593-528: The City of Prague. According to the newspaper Mladá fronta DNES , the information was proved by contracts found in the city archives. The Foundation is in talks with the City of Prague for the construction of a permanent home for the work. On 25 July 2010, over a thousand people gathered in Moravský Krumlov to protest the planned move of The Slav Epic from the town. After a two-year dispute between Prague and

1652-510: The Middle East, the report cautioned "Not only you as president but the American people as a whole should realize that if the American government decided to support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, they are committing the American people to the use of force in that area, since only by force can a Jewish state in Palestine be established or maintained." Crane opposed the establishment of

1711-682: The Moravian town of Moravský Krumlov, the renowned cycle of 20 monumental canvases was—in a move protested by conservationists and art historians alike—taken for display at the National Gallery's Veletržní Palace in 2012 and remained there until the end of 2016. In 2018, nine of the canvases of The Slav Epic were shown in Brno during the RE:PUBLIKA Festival. The exhibition combined two opposing worlds of renowned Art Nouveau artist Alphonse Mucha's works –

1770-593: The New York-based Institute of Current World Affairs . The institute employed field representatives in Mexico, Jerusalem, and occasionally Moscow. These representatives compiled regular reports on developments in their regions, and shared their expertise during ICWA-sponsored lecture tours of major US universities. The reports were also made available to the US State Department. In 1931, Crane helped finance

1829-584: The Slavic culture, Charles Richard Crane . He began by visiting the places he intended to depict in the cycle: Russia , Poland , and the Balkans , including the E. Orthodox monasteries of Mount Athos . Additionally, he consulted historians regarding details of historical events in order to ensure an accurate depiction. In 1910, he rented part of the castle in Zbiroh and began working on the series. Mucha continued working on

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1888-662: The US government's objections to two recent treaties between Japan and China. Crane contributed heavily to Woodrow Wilson 's 1912 election campaign. Wilson rewarded Crane with appointments to the 1917 Special Diplomatic Commission to Russia, known as the Root Commission , as a member of the American Section of the Paris Peace Conference , and to the 1919 Inter-Allied Commission on Mandates in Turkey that became known as

1947-462: The city of Prague requested the return of The Slav Epic for restoration work and subsequent display. However, the Mucha Foundation, run by the artist's grandson John Mucha and his mother Geraldine, blocked the move as it would simply be a provisional measure. The City of Prague argued that not Alphonse Mucha but Charles R. Crane was the owner of the paintings and that he has donated the cycle to

2006-434: 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

2065-496: The cycle for 18 years, gradually submitting paintings to the city of Prague as he completed them. In 1919, the first part of the series comprising eleven canvases was displayed in the Prague's Clementinum . In his opening speech, Mucha stated: "the mission of the Epic is not completed. Let it announce to foreign friends – and even to enemies – who we were, who we are, and what we hope for. May

2124-427: 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

2183-405: 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

2242-515: The exposition of The Slav Epic cycle became irrelevant and unimportant for the new communist regime. After the war, the paintings were moved to the chateau at Moravský Krumlov by a group of local patriots, and the cycle went on display there in 1963. The city of Prague has waged a decade-long legal battle over the work which intensified in early 2010. Much consideration has been given to relocating The Slav Epic from Moravský Krumlov (where it had been displayed for almost 50 years), to Prague. The hope

2301-477: 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

2360-518: The first explorations for oil in Saudi Arabia and Yemen . He was instrumental in gaining the American oil concession there. He was also a member of the famous Jekyll Island Club (aka The Millionaires Club) on Jekyll Island, Georgia . His son, Richard Teller Crane II , was a diplomat. In the wake of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, Crane was instrumental in rescuing from destruction some of

2419-487: 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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2478-844: 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

2537-500: 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/

2596-647: The main tower of Harvard's Lowell House and at Harvard Business School 's Baker Library , where they safely remained for over 70 years. Beginning in the 1980s, with openness under Gorbachev, there were calls to return the bells, and after numerous meetings over the years, the bells were returned to the Russian Orthodox Church and the Danilov monastery in 2008. When Franklin Roosevelt appointed William E. Dodd American ambassador to Germany in 1933, Crane wrote Dodd

2655-580: The majestic Slav Epic and a unique collection of posters. The paintings were controversially taken on a two year tour of Asia, returning to Prague in 2019. The work consists of 20 paintings, up to six metres tall and eight metres wide. [REDACTED] Media related to The Slav Epic at Wikimedia Commons 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 ),

2714-559: The most important Russian bells , from the Danilov monastery. When the Communists closed the monastery in 1929, the Danilov bell set was saved from Communist melting by Crane's purchase of the bells. The largest of the bells, Bolshoi (or The Big One - called The Mother Earth Bell at Harvard), weighs 13 tons and has a 700-pound clapper. The smallest weighs just 22 pounds. Crane donated the bells to Harvard University and they were installed in

2773-441: 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 Charles R. Crane Crane was the eldest son of plumbing parts mogul, Chicago manufacturer, Richard T. Crane . As a young man, Crane traveled extensively with his friend Charles B. Cory ,

2832-564: 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

2891-441: 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

2950-461: 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

3009-513: The stipulation that the museum would employ Cory as permanent curator of the collection. In the 1900s, he brought Thomas Masaryk , Maksim Kovalevsky and Pavel Milyukov to lecture at the University of Chicago . After meeting Masaryk, he became interested in Slavic nationalism and sponsored The Slav Epic paintings by Alphonse Mucha When Mucha designed the Czechoslovak bills , he used

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3068-725: The strength of the Slav spirit command their respect, because from respect, love is born." In 1921, five of the paintings were shown in New York and Chicago to great public acclaim. In 1928, the complete cycle was displayed for the first time in the Trade Fair Palace in Prague, the Czechoslovak capital. Alphonse Mucha died in July, 1939. Shortly before his death he was interrogated by the Gestapo , as he

3127-400: The town of Moravský Krumlov . Alphonse Mucha spent many years working on The Slav Epic cycle, which he considered his life's masterwork. He had dreamed of completing such a series, a celebration of Slavic history, since the turn of the 20th century; however, his plans were limited by financial constraints. In 1909, he managed to obtain grants by an American philanthropist and keen admirer of

3186-424: 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

3245-610: The work was a part of the permanent exhibition at the chateau in the town of Moravský Krumlov in the South Moravian Region of the Czech Republic . In 2012, all 20 works were moved and displayed together on the ground floor of the Veletržní Palace until 2016, in an exhibition organized by the National Gallery in Prague (exhibition catalogue: Alphonse Mucha – Slovanská epopej). The works are currently on display back in

3304-459: Was an important exponent of public life in Czechoslovakia . During World War II, The Slav Epic was wrapped and hidden away to prevent seizure by the Nazis. Following the Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948 and subsequent communist takeover of the country, Mucha was considered a decadent and bourgeois artist, estranged from the ideals of socialist realism . The building of a special pavilion for

3363-659: 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

3422-529: 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

3481-542: Was that Prague, a city frequented by many thousands of tourists, would attract increased attention to the series of paintings. However, there is no suitable space for the work in Prague's galleries. Therefore, some Czech state institutions, such as the Office of the President of the Czech Republic , found it preferable to leave the paintings in their current location since there have been few problems there. Nevertheless, in early 2010,

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