Word of the Week: host – 'guest'

'Host' might be a challenge for English-speaking Czech learners, since the word looks like the opposite of what it means – not a guest, but a host!

One thing to bear in mind is that very early Czech went through a change that turned G-sounds into H-sounds. You can see one example of this change in the Czech word hrad ‘castle’ when you compare it with Petrograd in Russia and Belgrade in Serbia. Even the English name for the city of Prague includes an old G-sound that has since been modified in the Czech version, Praha.

Equipped with this piece of sound history, we can assume that host too was once ‘gost’. This sounds like and is distantly related to German Gast, Danish gæst and of course English guest. Host and guest are in fact distant word cousins, and this sound change helps us to see that.

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Příspěvek sdílený Radio Prague International (@radio_prague)