Word of the Week: chvíle – ‘while’

Sometimes, a language can get a word from another language, and preserve aspects of the word that are changed in the original source. 

For example, the Czech word chvíle starts with a CH sound. That sound was there in the old German word hwīla, which Czech adopted centuries ago, but it’s no longer there in the Modern German version: Weile.

Likewise, it was there in hwīla’s ‘sister’ word in Old English: hwīl. Yet there’s no distinct sound at the beginning of the Modern English word that both translates and is related to Czech chvíle: while.

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Příspěvek sdílený Radio Prague International (@radio_prague)