# Are there words that only exist in Czech but not Slovak?



## frankcostello

I've heard that Czech language has a much higher range of vocabulary compared to Slovak language. Do you think it's true? Can you think of any words that don't have slovak equivalent without some meaning lost?


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## werrr

frankcostello said:


> I've heard that Czech language has a much higher range of vocabulary compared to Slovak language. Do you think it's true?


Definitely, if only because Czech has more speakers, more dialects, richer literary tradition and thus much bigger potential to various aberrations.
Czech is also more conservative and pays respect to ancient differences which are neglected in modern Slovak.


> Can you think of any words that don't have Slovak equivalent without some meaning lost?


Of course. 

 There are tons of words in Slovak which correspond to two different words in Czech, just because Czech preserved morphological difference which is lost in Slovak. For example abstract and concrete adjectives like Czech* sluneční* (solar) and *slunečný *(sunny)which both become *slnečný* in Slovak, or all the Czech words which differ only in prefixes *s-* and *z- *and become one single word in Slovak (e.g. Czech *správa* and *zpráva* both corresponding to Slovak *správa*).

If you are interested in particularities, you can think of Czech words like *kalhoty*, *povidla**, padla**, medle, aniž, týti, tipec, kašna, purkmistr, buřt, zhůvěřilý, oukrop, hlemýžď, kos, kleč, žďár, bezpáteřník, přizdisráč, čehona, čobol.

*But there are also Slovak words with no analog in Czech and I bet we could compete here with Slovaks in giving examples for ages. These anecdotal examples can't answer the question you raised. To judge the range of Czech and Slovak vocabulary you have to do some serious quantitative research like comparing Czech and Slovak corpora and you have also to deal somehow with the strong interaction between the languages which makes it easy and almost harmless for any of the languages to adopt a word of the other language.


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## vianie

Czech and Slovak vocabularies comparing? Practically incomparable.



werrr said:


> Czech has more dialects



I'm guessing this was a news not only for me. I had been in appearences that Czech never ever had as geo-political conditions as Slovak had to keep / stratify its dialects.


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## Tinu

I am no expert on dialects, but I tend to agree with vianie that it is not correct to say that Czech has more dialects. I would not say that we haven't had the conditions to develop and preserve them - we have (for centuries, most of our country has been almost as rural as what is now Slovakia). But at least in modern Czech there are far fewer dialects then there used to be. What is more, the diversity of various regional forms is 
(partly) preserved mainly in Moravia and Silesia, whereas more significant differences between various Bohemian dialects (in accent morphology and vocabulary) are mostly gone, with the possible exception of the dialects from south-west (Chodsko) and north-east (Podkrkonoší). 
I am quite sure that the diversity of dialects and accents in modern Slovak is considerable greater and, what is more, there is I think much weaker tendency to abandon dialects in favour of "general colloquial Slovak", as is happening in Czech (this process being largely finished in Bohemia and progressing rapidly in Moravia).


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## vianie

Tinu said:


> for centuries, most of our country has been almost as rural as what is now Slovakia


This is a ridiculous claim, Tinu. 



> there is I think much weaker tendency to abandon dialects in favour of "general colloquial Slovak", as is happening in Czech


There's no such a thing in today's Slovak and I don't even see the horizont it could ever be.


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## Tinu

1) It is not ridiculous, it is, admittedly, open to debate  But such a debate would be outside the topic of this thread and it is not essential to the matters discussed here, right?

2) You are right, I should have formulated my claim about the "dialects v. general colloquial language problem" more clearly. I wasn't suggensting that there exists a "general colloquial Slovak", equivalent to general colloquial Czech, but that the dialects of Slovak, un like those of Czech, are not "endangered" by such a phenomenon.


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