Languagle #12: Czech
Kdo ráno vstává, tomu Pán Bůh dává
"God gives to the one who rises early."
What it means
Getting up early brings its reward. The Czech equivalent of 'the early bird catches the worm', but with God as the one handing out rewards, and one of the most often quoted Czech proverbs.
How to say it
GDOH RAH-noh FSTAH-vah, TOH-moo PAHN BOOKH DAH-vah
Czech always stresses the first syllable of a word. Roll the r, and say kh like the ch in Scottish loch. Kdo starts with a g sound and vstává with an f, because Czech consonants change to match the one next to them.
Word by word
- Kdo GDOH: who
- ráno RAH-noh: in the morning
- vstává FSTAH-vah: gets up
- tomu TOH-moo: to that one
- Pán Bůh PAHN BOOKH: the Lord God (pán means lord, Bůh means God)
- dává DAH-vah: gives
Vstává and dává rhyme, which is a big part of why it sticks.
Where it was found
Written down in Karel Hrubý's 1880 collection of proverbs used by Czech country people, now on Czech Wikisource. Like most proverbs, it has no known author.
Similar sayings
- Slovak: Kto ráno vstáva, tomu Pán Boh dáva. Almost word for word the same, and a neat way to see how close Czech and Slovak are: kdo becomes kto, Bůh becomes Boh.
How to recognise Czech
Czech uses the Latin alphabet with a lot of accents. Look for the háček, the little v on top of letters like č, š, ž and ě, and for long vowels marked with an acute accent: á, é, í, ó, ú and ý. The real giveaways are ř and ů. Almost no other language uses ř, and ů (a u with a small ring on top) is close to unique to Czech. Slovak looks very similar but has ä, ô, ĺ and ŕ, and no ř or ů. Polish uses ł, ą and ę, and writes many of the same sounds with letter pairs like sz, cz and rz instead of háčeks.
About the Czech language
Czech is a West Slavic language spoken by around 10 million people, mostly in Czechia. Its spelling system, with háčeks such as č, š and ž, goes back to reforms attributed to the religious reformer Jan Hus in the early 1400s, and several other languages later borrowed the idea. Czech has the sound written ř, a trilled r made at the same time as a 'zh', which is rare among the world's languages and notoriously hard for learners.
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