Díky moc!
Czech is... well, as a languague, Czech is sort of like the architecture of the old towns of Prague, or Tábor, or even Litomerice. Amazingly ornate and very decorative – but only so long as you're just passing through. I honestly had no idea the Indo-European language family did stuff like this, especially not right here in Europe. It's astonishing but man it's brutal to learn.
> the perfectly valid English sentence "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo".
This one is interesting because it is only valid in American English. In any other dialect it's just noise. To me as a Brit, "buffalo" is not and cannot be a verb, and it's not a place anyone much has heard of either – it's an obscure faraway foreign city (I think?) that I might forget existed if it were not for this one silly sentence.
It takes several minutes of explanation to a British English speaker what this means.
(I had to learn it, as a TEFL teacher.)
> I'm honestly not sure how an ordinary person might read this.
Let me put it this way. I showed all my friends and colleagues this pic. All were baffled. My graduate linguist colleague Nora asked for a copy, showed it to her mum, and to her surprise, her mum could read it and told Nora what it said. But, she told me, her mum studied ancient languages including historical Czech.
> Čapek uses pre-modern orthography (e.g. gegj for její) for stylistic effect ('ye olde... ') in small sections of Válka s mloky
I did not know that, but I've only read it in translation. (I am nowhere near ready for novels in Czech. Even comic books go over my head.) Great book, and I liked it much more than R.U.R.
But that was written ninety years ago. Things have changed.
I am reminded of listening to a dad explaining to his little son at Prague Zoo that "tram" was pronounced "trem" in English. I wanted badly to jump in and correct him, but I didn't.
It is not pronounced "trem". It sounds the same as in Czech: tram, tram. "Camping" is not "kemping", it's "kamping". The thing is this: about 100 - 125 years ago, a very upper class Received Pronunciation accent would say "man" as \mæen\, a dipthong: ma-en. That's what old textbooks record. But nobody has spoken like that since roughly the formation of the First Republic: it's as long gone as World War 1.
But just as 45Y ago my primary school French textbooks tranlated "voiture" as "carriage", as in "horse and carriage", this is not true any more. It's hopelessly obsolete. Nobody says "træm" or "mæn" any more, but the old textbooks people are using to teach from are obsolete. It's way easier than the textbooks make out.