Strč prst skrz krk

Waveform and spectrogram for the Czech expression.

Strč prst skrz krk ( str̩tʃ pr̩st skr̩s kr̩k] ) is a Czech and Slovak tongue-twister meaning "stick your finger through your throat".[1]

The sentence is well known for being a semantically and syntactically sound clause without a single vowel, the nucleus of each syllable being a syllabic r, a common feature amongst many Slavic languages. It is often used as an example of such a phrase when learning Czech or Slovak as a foreign language.[1]

In fact, both Czech and Slovak have two syllabic liquid consonants, the other being syllabic l. (There is also the syllabic bilabial nasal m in sedm in Czech.) As a result, there are plenty of words without vowels. Examples of long words of this type are scvrnkls, čtvrthrst,[2] and čtvrtsmršť,[3] the latter two being artificial occasionalisms.

There are other examples of vowelless sentences in Czech and Slovak language, a longer one being "Škrt plch z mlh Brd pln skvrn z mrv prv hrd scvrnkl z brzd skrz trs chrp v krs vrb mls mrch srn čtvrthrst zrn." and one shorter but more sensible "Blb vlk pln žbrnd zdrhl hrd z mlh Brd skrz vrch Smrk v čtvrť srn Krč".

See also

References

  1. 1 2 (in French) "Le virelangue - jazykolam : strč prst skrz krk" - Radio Prague article about the phrase
  2. ↑ Wilson, James (2010). "Moravians in Prague: A Sociolinguistic Study of Dialect Contact in the Czech Republic". ISBN 9783631586945.
  3. ↑ http://www.ujc.cas.cz/jazykova-poradna/porfaq.html#nej


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