[shakow]

> My favorite demonstration of this is the verb "vorstellen"

What makes you think this is an example of an infuence of German over Czech, rather than a common verb construction mechanism across indo-european languages?

Russian (and probably other slavic languages) has представить, which is virtually the same but in cyrillic, French/English has introduire/introduce (from latin intro [into] and ducere [drive, lead]), etc.

[inglor_cz]

In general, modern Czech owes a significant fraction of its vocabulary to a certain Josef Jungmann, who published a big thesaurus about 180 years ago and "borrowed" new words into the up-to-that-time somewhat archaic language. Sometimes directly so, especially from other Slavic languages, sometimes via a calque from German/Latin/French etc.

Thus, sloka (stanza) is from Sanskrit, vzduch (air) from Russian, okres (county/region) from Polish, zeměpis (geography) a calque from Ancient Greek, and duchapřítomný (quick-witted) a calque from German geistesgegenwärtig.

I am not sure if vorstellen / představit is his calque as well.