Abigail Pagi - Machine Translation seminar

Czech

Origin

Geographic distribution

¨  Czech Republic ¤ 10 million residents ¤ Official language ¤ Mother tongue - 98%

n 3rd in the E.U.

¨  Slovakia ¤ 25% knowledge ¤ Minority language

Language Family

Language Family

¨  Slavic ¤ East Slavic ¤ South Slavic ¤ West Slavic

n Polish n Slovak- mutually intelligible

n  Less after 1993

n Czech

History

¨  Proto-Czech ¤ 6th century- Not written ¤ 9th century- Byzantine missionaries

n Christianity + Latin alphabet

¨  Old Czech ¤ 13th century- Separated from other Slavic tongues ¤ 16th century- Thirty Years War (Hapsburgs)

n Declined importance - outclassed by German

Modern Czech

¨  18th century - Czech National Revival ¨  20th century- Distance from Russian influences

¤ Public resentment- Soviet Union

Phonology & Grammar

Phonology

¨  10 vowels ¤ 5 short (a, e, i/y, o, u) ¤ 5 long (á, é, í/ ý, ó, ú/ů)

¨  3 diphthongs ¤ au, eu, ou

¨  Consonants ¤ Hard, neutral, soft ¤ Distinction for noun declension patterns, orthography ¤ Ř (rzh)

Consonants

¨  Strč prst skrz krk ¤  stick your finger through your throat

¨  From the family: ¤ Hlemýžď – Snail ¤ Zmrzlina- Ice cream ¤ Pštros - Ostrich

Grammar

¨  Primarily SVO ¨  BUT…

¤ Highly flexible ¤ Changed for focus

¨  Case marking for grammatical function ¨  Adjective precede nouns

Nouns

¨  Seven grammatical cases ¤ By use in the sentence: Main usageOrdinal name (Czech)

Subjectsprvní pád Belonging, movement away from something or someone druhý pád

Indirect objects, movement toward something or someone třetí pád

Direct objects čtvrtý pád

Addressing someone pátý pád

Locationšestý pád Being used for a task, acting alongside someone or something sedmý pád

Example

CzechEnglishvelký pesbig dog z velkého psafrom the big dogk velkému psovito the big dog na velkého psafor the big dogvelký pse!big dog!o velkém psoviabout the big dogs velkým psemwith the big dog

Nouns- cont.

¨  Genders ¤ Masculine

n Animate n  Inanimate

¤ Feminine ¤ Neuter

¨  Single vs. Plural

Verbs

¨  Suffixes according to: ¤ Person- first, second, third ¤ Number- singular, plural ¤ Tense- past, present, future ¤ Past & Passive- gender

¨  Verb classes ¨  Subject can be omitted if known from context (pro-

drop)

Verbs - Aspect

¨  Perfective vs. Imperfective ¤ Completed vs. ongoing

¨  State of the action at the time specified by tense ¨  Verbs come in aspectual pairs

¤ Differ by prefix/suffix ¤ Some verbs only exist in one aspect

Linguistic Tools

Linguistic Tools

¨  Google translate- since may 2008 ¤ Speech program since may 2010

¨  Corpora ¤ Prague Dependency Treebank - morphologically and

syntactically annotated corpus (about 2 MWo)  ¤ Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank - paralel

corpus (70K sentences) 

¨  Morphology tag systems

References

¨  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_language ¨  http://wikitravel.org/en/Czech_phrasebook ¨  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_conjugation ¨  http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~hana/Czech.html ¨  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Translate