Understanding Language Death in Czech-Moravian Texas

Based on several decades of personal interaction with Texas speakers of Czech, the author's article attempts to correlate social change with some specific stages of language obsolescence and language death. Many instances of language change in that community, as well as cultural and social change, may be explained by the linguistic model known as the wave theory. One hundred and fifty years passed between the introduction of Czech and the death of that language in Texas. From the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, the Czech-Moravians represented a closed community in which individuals defined their identity primarily by the Czech language, ethnicity, and culture. In the final five decades of the twentieth century, as the social template representing Texas speakers of Czech disintegrated, spoken Czech ceased to function as a living language, and much of the ancestral culture connected with the language was lost. Today some among the elderly, described as semi-speakers, terminal speakers, or "rememberers" of language, retain a limited knowledge, but the ancestral language now has only a symbolic function

Guideline for handling pesticide residues in Czech organic production

This document was prepared in the project «Development of guidelines for the use of pesticide analysis in organic inspection in the Czech Republic (sampling, evaluation and interpretation)». At the beginning of this project, a workshop with stakeholders was held. The present document builds on the outcomes of this workshop, and elaborates guidance for all stakeholders involved in Czech organic production and its control, on how to deal with residue analyses. In recognition of the European dimension of the problem, the project followed a two-step approach. In the first step, the present guideline was prepared. It is written in a general style and in the English language, so that it potentially applies for many countries. Although the current project aims specifically at the situation in the Czech Republic, its use for other countries is welcome! In the second step, a national guideline for the Czech Republic will be prepared, based on this document. The present document will serve as a blueprint for this guideline, which will be tailored to the specific situation in the Czech Republic and written in the Czech language. The aim is that all control bodies and authorities dealing with organic production and organic products in the Czech Republic will use this guideline

Comparative assessment of young learners' foreign language competence in three Eastern European countries

This paper concerns teacher practices in, and beliefs about, the assessment of young learners' progress in English in three Eastern European countries (Slovenia, Croatia, and the Czech Republic). The central part of the paper focuses on an international project involving empirical research into assessment of young learners' foreign language competence in Slovenia, Croatia and the Czech Republic. With the help of an adapted questionnaire, we collected data from a non-random sample of primary and foreign language teachers who teach foreign languages at the primary level in these countries. The research shows that English as a foreign language is taught mostly by young teachers either primary specialists or foreign language teachers. These teachers most frequently use oral assessment/interviews or self-developed tests. Other more authentic types of assessment, such as language portfolios, are rarely used. The teachers most frequently assess speaking and listening skills, and they use assessment involving vocabulary the most frequently of all. However, there are significant differences in practice among the three countries

Cross-Lingual Dependency Parsing for Closely Related Languages - Helsinki's Submission to VarDial 2017

This paper describes the submission from the University of Helsinki to the shared task on cross-lingual dependency parsing at VarDial 2017. We present work on annotation projection and treebank translation that gave good results for all three target languages in the test set. In particular, Slovak seems to work well with information coming from the Czech treebank, which is in line with related work. The attachment scores for cross-lingual models even surpass the fully supervised models trained on the target language treebank. Croatian is the most difficult language in the test set and the improvements over the baseline are rather modest. Norwegian works best with information coming from Swedish whereas Danish contributes surprisingly little

Latent Tree Language Model

In this paper we introduce Latent Tree Language Model (LTLM), a novel approach to language modeling that encodes syntax and semantics of a given sentence as a tree of word roles. The learning phase iteratively updates the trees by moving nodes according to Gibbs sampling. We introduce two algorithms to infer a tree for a given sentence. The first one is based on Gibbs sampling. It is fast, but does not guarantee to find the most probable tree. The second one is based on dynamic programming. It is slower, but guarantees to find the most probable tree. We provide comparison of both algorithms. We combine LTLM with 4-gram Modified Kneser-Ney language model via linear interpolation. Our experiments with English and Czech corpora show significant perplexity reductions (up to 46% for English and 49% for Czech) compared with standalone 4-gram Modified Kneser-Ney language model.Comment: Accepted to EMNLP 201

Ways of teacher foreign language competence formation in higher educational institution of Czech Republic and Poland

У статті розглядається досвід Чеської Республіки та Польщі у системі іншомовної підготовки вчителів та відповідно до цього визначено пріоритетні шляхи формування освітньої політики в даному концепті для освітнього простору в Україні. Автор висвітлює значення та зміст процесу іншомовної підготовки вчителів в контексті вищої освіти Чеської Республіки та Польщі, аналізує моделі формування іншомовної компетентності, можливий потенціал використання цього досвіду в умовах євроінтеграції українського освітнього простору.The article is devoted to the system of foreign language teacher training experience in the countries of Eastern Europe, especially Czech Republic and Poland. The priority ways of educational policy forming process for the educational space in Ukraine that is based on the Eastern Europe experience are determined in the article. Trends and aspects of International and European Cooperation between the Czech Republic and Poland in the International Educational Space are analyzed. The role of the «European dimension» in the process of foreign language teacher competence formation in Eastern European countries, in particular the Czech Republic and Poland according to the Eropean Union requirements, is considered in the article.The author highlights the importance of foreign language teacher formation in accordance with the modern European requirements. The main content of the foreign language teacher training process in the context of higher education in the Czech Republic and Poland is considered in the article. The step–by–step process of teachers’ foreign language teacher-student training is highlighted. Models of teacher’s foreign language competence formation, the potential use of this experience in the conditions of European integration of the Ukrainian educational space is analyzed. The author outlines the importance of European cooperation programs in the field of education, which highlights a motivational, methodological and practical basis for an effective foreign language teacher training system in Poland and the Czech Republic

German-language culture and the Slav stranger within

The aim of this article is to delineate the symbolic position of the Slavonic, and in particular the Czech, in German-language Austrian culture of the period 1890–1940. My approach will be informed by psychoanalysis. A subsidiary aim is to try to demonstrate uses of psychoanalysis in the study of central European culture. What is at issue here is an historical set of social power relations that find their expression in culture, that is to say, in art and literature, and that can be interpreted by psychoanalysis. All too often psychoanalysis avoids the social and the political outside the framework of the individual and her or his predictable traumas emanating from domestic life.1 This article, however, constitutes an exercise in inter- and intra-cultural psychoanalysis: intra-cultural as an investigation of psychoanalytic dynamics within German-language culture; inter-cultural as an examination of the relationship between German-language and Slav cultures in psychoanalytic terms

Performing Cultures: English-Language Theatres in Post-Communist Prague

The presence of English-language theatres (ELTs) in Prague in the nineties coincided with the ongoing transition to a market economy in the Czech Republic, as the English language itself became increasingly the international language of business and culture. Under Communism, Czech theatre had been highly political through veiled protests against the system of power. After 1989, Czech theatre began moving into spheres of commodification and tourism. How the ELTs in Prague negotiated their place in a shifting society reveals a performance of identity. The ELTs tracked the turning points in Czech post-revolutionary history of the 1990s.The history of the ELTs has been constructed through personal and telephone interviews and emails, as well as reviews, articles, manuscripts and production videotapes. Companies analyzed include North American Theatre, Small and Dangerous, Black Box International Theatre (which began its life as Studio Theatre), Exposure, and Misery Loves Company. Structurally, this investigation covers three distinct periods of the Czech transition: the optimistic early nineties; the mid-nineties, when the market economy flourished along with increasing instances of corruption; and the late nineties, when disillusionment affected the Czech Republic and most of the ELTs vanished.ELTs in Prague primarily used four production strategies: 1) representing the Performer's Culture; 2) representing the Host culture in English; 3) bi-cultural and/or bi-lingual productions, including nonverbal work, collaboration with Host culture theatre companies, and multicultural casting, and 4) presenting plays about culture clash. Theoretical underpinnings for this study include intercultural performance theory, reception and semiotic theory, historiography, and theories of globalization and cultural tourism.The achievements and disappointments of the ELTs reveal underlying principles of production and reception applicable not only to Eastern Europe but to any region with a growing English-speaking subculture. Findings include the observation that production strategy and mission are less significant than the cultural and economic contextualizing of the production company. Curiosity about the English language dwindles as its usage grows. ELTs that were most successful worked structurally with strategy number three in terms of performance venue, schedule and style, contributing to the cultural life of the city rather than self-consciously using theatre to cross borders

THE ROLE OF SYNTACTIC STYLISTIC MEANS IN EXPRESSING THE EMOTION TERM LOVE

Love as one of important feelings in human emotional, cognitive and social life has always attracted attention of the researchers: psychologists, linguists, philosophers, ethnologists, etc. We may speak about extralinguistic and linguistic ways of love manifestation. To linguistic ones belong, of course, stylistic means, which include lexical, syntactic, phonetic, and semasiological level. The author focuses on lexical-syntactical means of expressing love in two Slavic languages, Czech and Slovak, using linguocognitive and cultural approach. This research is inspired by the GRID project, which aimed at study of 24 emotion terms in 35 language

Discusión sobre la existencia de diglosia en la lengua checa

The Czech language is in a very particular sociolinguistic situation in comparison with other slavonic languages. In this paper I explain the discussion about the existence of diglossia in Czech language, due to the fact that this language has two different varieties for different contexts, in order to show the different positions in Bohemistics during the last decades. This work analyses some grammatical and lexical phenomena from both varietie