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by theSIRius 1966 days ago
It might have to do with the Czech National Revival[1]. The Czech language and culture was being suppressed in favour of Austrian/Germanic one. Prominent Czech figures worked to preserve the Czech language which included distancing from German words and phrases, redefinition of words and even invention of new ones.

It was pretty much a success and we ended with what could be called Czech 2.0. How many false friends were introduced because of the Revival, I am not sure.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_National_Revival

1 comments

In this article [1] i see quite a lot of funny examples of false friends for czech to russian translation. Stale is cherstvyj in russian, but in czech cherstvyj is fresh. A corpse in russian is a torso in czech. Shame is attention. A cigarette butt is a cucumber. Toadstool is buckwheat. Looseness is speed. And so on. Some words like zivot in czech are closer to old russian meaning (life) than current (stomach). Between some i can see some other relation. And with some i have no idea how it could coincide that way.

1. https://zen.yandex.ru/media/solo/takoi-zabavnyi-cheshskii-ia...

It's funny to see how languages branch out and develop independently. I specifically remember that Czech "Šukat drogy na záchodě", which means "To fuck drugs on the toilet", would be "Look for medicine in the west" in Polish. I'm not 100 % sure that the Polish is right but it shows pretty well how large the overlap between Slavic languages there is. And also how many false friends we have.