I'm glad this article addresses multiple languages and is from the perspective of Europeans, which adds a different flavor.
For my family, particularly my dad's side, he was the first and second English speaker. My grandmother, though born in the US, spoke #Czech until she was seven, and the sheriff forced her into school. Before that, her Moravian father thought girls didn't need to go to school. Later, as I was a kid, she would use it only with other, older relatives, and by the time ...
... she was in her 70s, she said she couldn't really remember Czech, because she didn't use it as the older relatives died.
My grandfather, on the other hand, was the first person not to speak #German on his side. Before that, all the family spoke German in #Texas since the 1840s. But WWI put an end to that. Other than greetings, my grandfather spoke little German at all. My great-grandfather spoke with a strong German accent.
There is a certain whistfulness about language that my father...
... expresses, not having learned the language of his mother or grandfather, but there's a certain practicality to it, as it is unlikely he would have ever really used either language in day-to-day.
In 1962, Czechoslovakia issued this pair of commemorative stamps
The designer was Anna Podzemna-Suchardová (1909-96) and the engraver was Jiří Antonin Švengsbír (1921-83)
🇨🇿 #Czech President Petr Pavel says security services should monitor #Russians living in the West, calling it "simply the cost" of the Kremlin's war against #Ukraine
@rvps2001 Totally agree - we 100% need to be able to put hands on the oligarchy's brats at a moment's notice. Interesting that this is coming from Pavel. Czechia has one of the bigger FSB problems. I'd place it third after Zurich and Brussels ahead of Austria.
TIL that #Polish and #Lithuanian have both taken the transcription from #Czech. Yet each has a different one. Polish took it from Old Czech. But the Czech language reformed and when the Lithuanians wanted to distinguish their language from the dominant Polish during the national revival, they adopted the transcription from modern Czech. That is why Polish has "cz" and Lithuanian has "č".