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() is a
() is a tongue twister
A tongue twister is a phrase that is designed to be difficult to articulate properly, and can be used as a type of spoken (or sung) word game. Additionally, they can be used as exercises to improve pronunciation and fluency. Some tongue twisters p ...
in Czech
Czech may refer to:
* Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe
** Czech language
** Czechs, the people of the area
** Czech culture
** Czech cuisine
* One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus
*Czech (surnam ...
and Slovak meaning 'stick a finger through the neck'. The sentence is well known for being a semantically and syntactically valid clause without a single vowel, the nucleus of each syllable being a syllabic ''r'', a common feature among many Slavic languages. It is often used as an example of such a phrase when learning Czech or Slovak as a foreign language.
In fact, both Czech and Slovak have two syllabic liquid consonants
Liquid is a state of matter with a definite volume but no fixed shape. Liquids adapt to the shape of their container and are nearly compressibility, incompressible, maintaining their volume even under pressure. The density of a liquid is usual ...
, the other being syllabic l. (There is also the syllabic bilabial nasal
The voiced bilabial nasal is a type of consonantal sound which has been observed to occur in about 96% of spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is m. ...
m in in Czech.) As a result, there are plenty of words without vowels. Examples of long words of this type are 'you (m.) flicked (something) away', 'quarter handful', and ''čtvrtsmršť'' 'quarter whirlwind', the latter two being artificial, though grammatical, constructs unlikely to occur spontaneously.
There are other examples of vowelless sentences in Czech and Slovak, such as , meaning 'a mole farted through grass, having swallowed a handful of grains'.
The longest Czech vowelless sentence (with 25 words and 82 consonants) as of 2013 is , meaning 'Stingy dormouse
A dormouse is a rodent of the family Gliridae (this family is also variously called Myoxidae or Muscardinidae by different taxonomists). Dormice are nocturnal animals found in Africa, Asia, and Europe. They are named for their long, dormant hibe ...
from Brdy
Brdy is a range of hills in the Czech Republic, forming a long massif stretching for c. 60 km southwest from Prague. The northern section of the Brdy is called "Hřebeny" and features one narrow ridge (highest elevation Písek - 690 m). The ...
mountains fogs full of manure spots firstly proudly shrank a quarter of handful seeds, a delicacy for mean does, from brakes through bunch of Centaurea
''Centaurea'' () is a genus of over 700 species of herbaceous thistle-like flowering plants in the family Asteraceae. Members of the genus are found only north of the equator, mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere; the Middle East and surrounding ...
flowers into scrub of willows'.
See also
*Shibboleth
A shibboleth ( ; ) is any custom or tradition—usually a choice of phrasing or single word—that distinguishes one group of people from another. Historically, shibboleths have been used as passwords, ways of self-identification, signals of l ...
* Consonant cluster
In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word ''splits''. In the education fie ...
* Chrząszcz
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Strc prst skrz krk Czech language Word games Tongue twisters Phonotactics Slovak language Articles containing video clips