Chung wrote:Moc děkuju za komentář a opravy, Caveso a RAMDRIVEsyse! No zdá sa, že musím opraviť aj profil slovenčiny, však?
Gah! Cavesa, why didn't you say anything more the first time round? I've looked even more like an idiot for the last several months!
I'll try to tweak the Czech and Slovak profiles over the next few weeks and it could take a little more time than usual.
On
Už Jsme Doma, I just asked one of my Czech friends for some recommendations and got a grab-bag of names. I then worked them into the profile and I was in no position to question the popularity or familiarity of these musicians among you Czechs.
One thing that's bugging me a bit now: I've ALWAYS gathered that using
já byl / šel / měl etc. is colloquial after observing that all of my textbooks without exception have presented
byl / šel / měl jsem etc. as THE (standard) way to express past tense, and to boot this was also the only way I was exposed to in my Czech classes. I first encountered
já byl / šel / měl etc. in some of my Czech friends' posts on Facebook a few years ago leading me to conclude that they're colloquial or maybe a recent development. It's been a negative inference for me on the lines that since
já byl / šel / měl etc. were never shown to me in classes or textbooks focused on standard Czech, then I would end up regarding these variants to be colloquial (or non-standard). What's going on here? Are
byl jsem etc. slowly being supplanted by
já byl etc. in the 21st century or have they've always been around as part of standard Czech but at a lower frequency than now?
You're welcome. I have no clue why I hadn't written more the first time around. But you didn't look like an idiot!
That music band: there are many. The most well known ones are older, from the era of Czechoslovakia. The older generation knows Olympic, Marta Kubišová (who is awesome btw, too bad the communists destroyed her career as a punishment), and many others (the Slovak examples are just as numerous as the Czech ones, perhaps even more). It is much more common for the musicians from the communist era to be known by the whole nation, because they simple didn't have to compete with the foreigners. They were often the only way a czech or slovak could get to know a foreign melody. With added Czech lyrics (or Slovak but I cannot remember those. that is probably just a gap in my education though), it was an easy shortcut to success to just get a great melody, already tried on public elsewhere. And probably without having paid the real authors, and now they dare to complain about pirates and some even call the copied songs "national treasure". It was hard to get the foreign music. LPs were smuggled from Bulgaria or Yugoslavia (each socialist country was allowing their citizens a different list of foreign music, and the Czechoslovak censors tended to be among the most strict ones. But other kinds of goods were being smuggled from Czechoslovakia in the other direction, for example chocolate, from what I heard). And they were sold in the streets similarily to the way you can buy drugs these days. And the punishments for their distribution were comparable too.
The younger generations are much more split among various artists and genres. There are not that many bands or musicians that would be liked by everyone, or even known by everyone. We know the originals these days, you need to come with your own stuff, that is more difficult. We can listen to long playlists of music from all over the world, you need to compete against those for our attention. It is easier to be known within a genre, or within a region, that might be the root of the "Už jsme doma" band recommendation. I could give you examples of other such bands, that I personally find much better than the Czech mainstream, but they simply won't serve as general national representants either. And out of the Czech mainstream, I personally don't want to inflict some of them upon the ears of innocent people reading a Czech profile. All this makes it hard to recommend something Czech, widely known, of good quality, and contemporary, all this at once.
...........
No, I don't think adding personal pronouns more often is a sign of colloquialism, or a new trend. New trends tend to go in the direction of further simplification and shortening, not the opposite, anyways. Both versions, with and without the pronoun, have their place in both standard and colloquial register. And the difference in their use is the same in both too. I think you may have encountered one of the problems of coursebooks that we often discuss here on the forum. I would say that the problem is not your textbook not showing your colloquial language, because this is not a typical feature defining it. I would rather assume that your textbook didn't introduce you to the examples and situations, where adding the personal pronoun would be the right choice. But I haven't read your textbook, so it is just an assumption, based on my knowledge of Czech and of language textbooks in general. They may simply have chosen not to confuse the learners, and stick to the simple rule "no personal pronoun as subject of the sentence".