|
|
Dikobraz ‚porcupine‘ and buvol ‚buffalo‘ 200 years after Presl – research in the present-day pronunciation of two common nouns
Štěpánová, Veronika ; Novák, J.
Within a scientific internship for high school students realized in 2021 in the Czech Language Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, besides other things, the current pronunciation usage of the expressions dikobraz ‚porcupine‘ and buvol ‚buffalo‘, both proposed by J. S. Presl as official Czech zoological terms, has been investigated. Both of these designations are remarkable from the phonetic point of view. In case of dikobraz, the existing monolingual dictionaries of Czech have so far admitted the pronunciation variants [dɪkobras] and [ɟɪkobras]. The analysis of sound records from the online archives of Czech public media has proved that the variant [ɟɪkobras], reflecting the etymological origin of this Russianism, has not appeared in a representative sample of both professional and non‑professional speakers. An informal survey has discovered that its occurrence would be surprising or disturbing for a majority of the users of Czech. On the other hand, in case of the second analysed expression buvol, it has been proved that more than one third of the investigated Czech speakers use the sound variant [buːvol], whereas no such sound (or graphical) variant is codified at present (however, J. S. Presl originally proposed a form written bůvol). The results of this research may serve also as important data for the arising Academic Dictionary of Contemporary Czech, for the Internet Language Reference Book etc.
|
guest ::
