Czech It Out

It's Tuesday again, which means I'm letting my geek flag wave proudly. This week in my class we are studying morphology. Our exercise this week comes in the form of picking out a foreign language and attempting to complete the linguistic puzzle for it. There was a long list, but Czech caught my eye immediately - probably because Prague is on my bucket list and because my great-grandparents were both born in Czechoslovakia. Disclaimer - I know not a word of Czech. I know a few words like beer, house, bottom, and red-headed devil in Slavic, but I didn't imagine that would help me with the time of day in Czech.

If you'd like to try your hand at this puzzle, click here.
If you'd like to take yourself to task with some other languages, click here.

Here's how I came up with my answers(spoiler alert - don't look if you want to take the test yourself):


For this assignment, I selected the Czech linguistic puzzle, which requires the participant to try their hand at two sentences in Czech regarding time. The user is given several examples of how time should be written in Czech.

My rational in solving the puzzle was to look first for words that look similar to English words. From this I opted to presume that minut in Czech is equivalent to the noun minute or minutes in English. It also seemed to me that čtvrt could possibly translate to quarter. The rest of the words needed to translate the two sentences I was given, I guessed at based on the information provided in the mini telling time lesson above the problems. The following are what I guessed the words to be:

·         Osm – Eight

·         Půl – Half, as in half past.

·         Devate – Nine

·         Šeste – Six

·         Sedm – Seven

·         Deset - Ten

·         Na – To

·         Za – It’s

 The two phrases in English I had to translate into Czech were:

·         23 minutes after five

·         10 minutes after nine

To solve these, I relied on phrases from the mini lesson that were similar in nature and changed out the numbers to the appropriate ones. It seemed from the two examples with after in the time phrase that the convention was to explain the difference from the quarter to the next hour or half to the next hour. So 23 minutes after five would translate into Its seven minutes from half to six and 10 minutes after nine would be Its five minutes from quarter to ten.