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crowd the consonants into the first syllable, and to leave out the vowels in words of foreign origin, as for instance; brada, beard; mleko, milk: mrawy, mores; mru, morior; plny, plenus; breg, berg (mountain).
The resemblance between the bohemian and polish is great. About three-fourths of the whole number of words in both languages, are derived from a common root; but in the construction and pronunciation it has more affinity with the russian. It has the remarkable peculiarity of placing the accent on the first syllable, and of even submitting foreign words to this almost universal law; Lucerna, for example, is pronounced Lūcĕrnă.
The late writers on bohemian prosody contend, that of all living languages (the moravian and slowakian excepted, which are dialects of the bohemian), theirs is the only one whose verses may be measured by feet instead of syllables;[1] the discovery is one of our own times, and escaped the observation of Dobrowsky, the most indefatigable of slavonian critics. It would not be easy,
- ↑ For a very curious paper on the subject, see Krok.
