long a, short a, a, a, a

so i just totally made martin and jan's day.

three weeks ago at the orientation dinner to the REU, i asked the czech grad student coordinator (martin) to pronounce his last name for me (it's balek) so that i could introduce him... i copied him and he said "no, it's a short a" and repeated it, emphasizing the ba... it sounded the same to me, but i tried to copy again, and he, jan, josef, and marek (all 4 czech students in the REU this summer) laughed "or long a if you prefer". i apologized and commented that i would learn to say it right by the end of the summer.

fast forward 3 weeks to last night... ben and i were at barnes and noble and i found a czech pronunciation and phrase book which i figured would not be a bad thing for me to learn well in the next month (i go to prague for 2.5 weeks on july 23)... for long a in czech, the book has the a sound from "father"... for short a in czech, it suggests "halfway between the a in cat and the u in cup"... oi...

so this afternoon, after the REU seminar, i said to martin "so when you have time, i have a question about czech", he said by all means ask, so i gave him this paragraph:
"when i asked your name 3 weeks ago, you said to use a short a... when an american says 'short a', we mean the a sound in 'cat' or in 'apple'.... when we say 'long a' we mean the 'a' sound in 'name' or 'ate'... i'm guessing your 'long a' and your 'short a' are neither of those, and this is why i got confused. can you help explain the difference to me?". martin couldn't think of a good example for a czech 'short a' on the spot, and i told him that if he thought of one, i really would like to learn.

so, while we're both in our office 20 minutes later he goes to the board and says "ok lara, so i have it... long a, like in 'car', short a is like in 'cup'... almost..." as we were practicing the sounds and trying to decide how closely i pronounce 'cup' and 'car' to martin's intended pronunciations, jan, one of the czech undergrads walked in... martin explained in czech what was going on, and together they made the following pronunciation guide for me, but with testing my english pronunciation for each word before they left it on the chart:

a like in cup
á like in car
u like in put
ů or ú like in bloom
i,y like in slip
í,ý like in sleep
e like in met
é like in mare
o like in stop (only they pronounced it more like how a hungarian would say stop than how an american would)
ó like in more
ou like in oh!
au like in out
š like in sheep (equivalent to hungarian s)
č like in czech
ž like in measure (equivalent to hungarian zs)
ě (makes the preceeding consonant soft... as best i can tell, i should pretend that there's a y attached to the previous letter when i see this form of 'e')
ř (the phrase book i got last night says "a sound unique to czech like r+ž (zh) pronounced in quick succession"... jan's comment when he tried to approximate it was "this letter is in the guiness book as hardest letter in all languages ever to pronounce. unless you're czech there's little hope")

after much discussion, they gave me some vocab words to practice with (jan got very excited about coming up with more and more for me to say and martin seemed pleased i had asked about how to say czech words as well), and they promised to answer questions no matter how bad my pronunciation is. :-) on my way out of the building i heard martin and jan talking to marek and josef in josef, jan, and marek's office (next door to mine), excitedly in czech... the words i pulled out were the czech word for american and for czech langauge, so i think i amused them all.

now that i got an hour long lesson in czech pronunciation from czech students, i need to make good on having them available to teach me for free, and study!

later dudes :-P