#hacek

[craftsypenguin]

Ofc I forgot to share it here:

This is such a magical crazy thing, I love it! Ruffle hat from the Polo stripes. It eats up a lot of yarn, but the flower crown effect is priceless 💜

#crocheting #crochet #hackovani #hacek #rufflehat #flowercrown #handmade #polostripe #redheartpolostripe #mermaidcolors #plll #summerhat #magic #crazystuff

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A post shared by Zuzka (she/her) (@craftsy_penguin)

[wownew-blog]

Please pay attention to your guild wars 2 account securities

[the-czech-book]

The Case of the Missing Háček...

... otherwise known as my foray into the Czech alphabet.

As Czech is a phonetic language, I figured I should have at least a little idea of how to say words before learning what they mean.  So I looked up the alphabet on the ever-steadfast Wikipedia, and found to my nerdy delight that the number of letters mirrors the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

The page was helpful on giving the letters in order.  It was a little less helpful on the pronunciation front.  It gave the IPA symbols as pronunciation, but I'm not particularly familiar with the IPA, and the page explaining the symbols is slightly terrifying to look at.  I opted to try and track down some other source for the pronunciation.

Now, in Czech, there are two kinds of accents.  There's the čárka (char-ka), which we'd call an accent, and it shows up over the vowels: á, é, í, ó, ú (I'm told this one shows up at the beginnings of words.  There's also a ů, which shows up within words), and ý (no longer a "sometimes" vowel!).  Then there's the háček (ha-check), which is the upside-down carat that appears over a number of letters: č, ď (the capital looks like Ď), ĕ, ň, ř, š, ť (Ť), and ž.  I haven't found a pronunciation for ĕ or ř yet, although I've heard ř is really weird.

As with most people in my age demographic, much of my writing is done on a keyboard.  English Qwerty keyboards, however, don't have accent keys.  No matter, there are all sorts of codes you can punch in to get the accents you want: Opt-N on a Mac gets you Ñ, very important in Spanish.  It gets you these (´) accents over the vowels, accents going the other way, umlauts (¨), what I only know as an upside-down háček (ˆ), all kinds of things.

I cannot, however, for the life of me find something analogous for háčeks.  Googling it is a special matter, because it things you mean "hack", and once I did find something relevant, both codes it gave me made things that were not háčeks: √ and ≈.  My computer does have a Qwerty Czech keyboard option, but that involves switching back and forth between keyboards if I want to type numbers or punctuation marks.  Not to mention that there's also a non-qwerty Czech keyboard, which rearranges punctuation and swaps the Y and Z keys for some reason.

Bane as this is, it's probably the least of my linguistic worries.