Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 July 22

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July 22[edit]

Czech alphabet[edit]

Why most alphabet songs in Czech, and also this Wiktionary page omit all letters with diacritics, and use only basic Latin alphabet and Ch. In contrast, e.g. in Turkish, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Icelandic, Latvian and Lithuanian, which also have many separately-collated diacritic letters, all alphabet songs include all letters of alphabet. Why does Czech "discriminate" against special letters? --40bus (talk) 14:54, 22 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Citation needed for "most alphabet songs". A search for "czech alphabet songs" finds immediately most of them use the entire alphabet. --jpgordon𝄢𝄆𝄐𝄇 15:22, 22 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
When I searched "česká abeceda" in YouTube, most songs I found use only 27 letters. --40bus (talk) 15:41, 22 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Then something is weird in your search, as the exact same search finds a couple of toddler-oriented videos that are only showing the basic (non-diacritic) letters, but the bulk of the videos are full alphabet, in proper order. So your question has no evidence behind it; there's nothing other than a deficient search to indicate that Czech "discriminates" in any such way. --jpgordon𝄢𝄆𝄐𝄇 16:06, 22 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
As far as Wiktionary is concerned, that was a change made by one editor back in 2010; someone (you!) should go change it to put the letters in the right order. --jpgordon𝄢𝄆𝄐𝄇 16:12, 22 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
40bus -- We do have an article Czech alphabet. In most cases, how words are sorted in dictionaries and such (i.e. the "collation order") would be more decisive with respect to what should be considered as the "same" and "different" letters than alphabet songs! I can't find much detailed info in English on Czech collation order (most of the search results are software programmers complaining), but this article apparently explains it in Czech... AnonMoos (talk) 16:38, 22 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I found a little bit on Czech collation order at Alphabetical order#Language-specific conventions (scroll down). If having only "secondary collation weight" is taken as indicating that a combination of letter + diacritic is not really a distinct letter, then the accented vowels and several of the consonant + diacritic combinations would not be distinct. AnonMoos (talk) 16:48, 22 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps. But it does appear that the alphabet songs mostly go A Á B C Č except for the most primary ones that are teaching the basic letter shapes. --jpgordon𝄢𝄆𝄐𝄇 17:10, 22 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]