Slovak Language Research Articles

The moderating effect of valenced contact: Slovak language media use, acculturation and L2 confidence among young Hungarian speakers

ABSTRACTIntegrating the tenets of the social context model of L2 acquisition with insights from the parasocial contact hypothesis, the present paper addresses the role of mass media in L2 acquisition and acculturation among young Hungarian speakers in Slovakia. Questionnaire data were collected among Hungarian-speaking secondary school students (N = 310). The results indicated that integrative orientation guided individuals to seek media content in L2, and that L2 media use was associated with a higher L2 confidence and acculturation. Additionally, and in contrast to our expectations, L2 media use had a greater effect on acculturation and L2 confidence among those who had higher levels of positively valenced contact and lower levels of negatively valenced real-life contact with L2 speakers.

External Part of School Leaving Examination and its Statistical Analysis in Selected Region

Abstract School leaving exam represents one of possibilities how to finish upbringing and education at high schools. School leaving exam (including its external part) is a form of graduation at high school and presents the basis for further studies at universities. Quality of education determines the competitiveness of graduates from primary, secondary school and universities on domestic as well as foreign labor market. Paper focuses on statistical evaluation of External part of school leaving exam on the set of 112 high schools of Presov Region in 2015. We evaluate an average percentage of school in External part of school leaving examination, an average grade of Slovak language and a number of tested students. To identify a district's correlations and differences Moran's Index, Kruskal-Wallis test or Kendal coefficient were used. The differences between the individual results in districts and its comparison are described by a few statistical methods (box plot, maps, moment characteristics) too.

Kinship Terminology in Ruthenian and in Serbian

In the first part of the paper the author provides an overview of research regarding kinship terminology in Ruthenian. In the second part he compares the Ruthenian kinship relations terms with Serbian ones. The Serbian kinship relations system is more complex. For instance, the term бачи covers the meanings of ујак , стриц , and течо , and the term андя covers the meanings of ујна , стрина , and тетка . Simplification of the Ruthenian kinship relations system in relation to the Serbian language is particularly evident at the level at which relations for sisters’ and brothers’ children are expressed, and as equivalent terms to братанац , братић , синовац , нећак and сестрић , respectively братаница , синовица , нећака and сестричина occur only братняк , respectively шестринїца / шестранїца . The lexeme дзивка stands out because it covers three meanings, that is, three lexemes of the Serbian language and the following three correspondent relations are established: дзивка : ћерка / кћи , дзивка : девојка / цура and дзивка : девојка / драгана . The highest degree of similarity between the kinship terms in Serbian and Ruthenian is noticed in the terms conveying names of male and female persons on the vertical line of kinship, for example оцец : отац , мац : мајка , брат : брат , шестра : сестра , син : син , дїдо : деда , баба : баба , унук : унук , унука : унука . Most of the Ruthenian kinship relations terms are of Slavic origin but there are two hungarisms ( бачи , андя ) and a germanism ( шовґор ). Some terms Ruthenian shared with Slovak as indicated by lexemes дцера and тета of the contemporary Slovak language. Since Ruthenian and Serbian coexist in Serbia/Vojvodina, and Serbian presents the majority language, it is most likely that in the period ahead of us the influence of the Serbian language concerning the terminology of kinship relations in the Ruthenian language will increase.

HIDDEN MARKOV MODEL BASED SPEECH SYNTHESIS SYSTEM IN SLOVAK LANGUAGE WITH SPEAKER INTERPOLATION

This paper describes the first experiments with speaker interpolation in Slovak speech synthesis system. The interpolation provides an approach to voice characteristic conversion for hidden Markov model based text-to-speech synthesis system. The main idea of this technique is to synthesize an artificial speech with unseen and untrained output speech characteristic by interpolating of the existing sets of the pretrained models. The use of this technique allows to create new voices without the need to add additional data into training procedure. This is a major advantage especially for the low resources languages, such as Slovak language, where it is often difficult to obtain the necessary amount of data. The obtained results shows that the characteristics of the synthesized speech is changed from one male speaker to another one with the help of the interpolation ratio by which the Slovak voices with the new characteristics may be crated.

Human Capital and Potential to Increase its Creativity

Abstract Article highlights the contribution of human capital, which is currently important for every business entity. In order to be an effective organization, it must have a human capital with creative potential. Creativity largely influences work and personal life balance and language skills. Therefore, in the first part of this paper, I concentrate on possibilities of increasing creativity of human resources and discuss the notion of human capital and creativity. Currently, if a business entity wants to be competitive and efficient, it must posses creative human resources. What are the possibilities of increasing creativity? Due to the global economic crisis, businesses prefer to reduce the cost of education. This tendency seems to be a very week one, even a dangerous one! The paper deals with the effectiveness of creative thinking and with the use of part of existing global environmental undertaking. The paper investigates in particular the language skills of human resources. I have compared the Slovak and Chinese language, as when operating on a given language, except others, human being is familiar with cultural differences in that particular language and can think within this framework, which creates a new perspective on problem solving in general, with a particular use in the respective organization (firm). In this article, I discuss and analyze the knowledge of human resource management and human capital theory. I use mainly comparative method and relational content analysis. The contribution is processed on the basis of Human Capital report (21). The main scientific objective is to highlight the language skills of the human resource and its link to creative thinking. Important issue seems to be a balance between professional and personal life, which forms an important basis for the development of creativity and creative thinking. Within the language skills, a specific highlight is dedicated to chromatic adjectives (colors) that are currently used in these languages, but also the idioms and phrases that are not possible to translate into another language.

La expresión de la finalización de la acción: un estudio contrastivo español-eslovaco

La expresión de la finalización de la acción: un estudio contrastivo español-eslovaco

Ako vníma materinský jazyk slovenská mládež v Maďarsku a na Slovensku? (Etnolingvistická reflexia)

The intention of this paper is to present the empirical research results of the Slovak youth lingual-communication behaviour in Slovakia and Hungary, whereas this research work was performed in both countries in the year 2010. Expressions of a spoken form of the Slovak language were investigated in surroundings which are typical for the application of the written language as a form of a social contact in school: with friends, peers, and in the family. The referential framework of this paper consists of three levels of analysis: 1. the analysis of communication skills in Slovak and Hungarian; 2. the analysis of the evaluation of life values; 3. the correlation of these parameters: language communication skills versus the perception of ethnic values (mother tongue).

Morphological Analysis of the Slovak Language

This paper proposes a new statistic-based method of segmenting words by identification of a suffix. Ability to identify suffix can improve morphological analysis by allowing the classifier to assign tags to words previously unseen in the training corpus. Identified suffix of the word can be used to improve the accuracy of the part-of-speech tagging or other natural language processing tasks.

Popular conspiracy theories in Slovakia and the Czech Republic

AbstractThe study presents popular conspiracy theories spread within the Czech and Slovak language milieu. Along with the growth in the number of internet portals disseminating this type of texts, their reflection in public opinion is also visible in the way almost every major foreign policy issue or domestic case is commented upon in public internet discussions. The authors seek to identify the narrative and rhetorical sources of conspiracism in these countries since the rise of modern nationalism in the 19th century, focusing on the events accompanying the creation of the common state of the Slovaks and Czechs, the period of the Second World War, the rule of the Communist regime, the events related to the fall of the Iron Curtain and the “Velvet Revolution” in 1989 up to the present. The paper focuses attention on group-shared images of the enemies and on mutual interactions between the interpretations of local events and global conspiracy theories, as well as updates or later reinterpretations of older conspiracy motifs.

Slovak Language of Roma Children: Mother Tongue or Second Language

This paper presents a study conducted with 40 Roma children from Slovakia, aged between 4-8 years, who are speakers of an ethnolect learned from their parents, but which in Slovak society is not considered to be a “good Slovak language”. Diagnostic tests in the official Slovak language were administered to the children in order to determine how well they know the complex grammatical categories of official Slovak: wh-questions, wh-complements and passive verbs. One hypothesis raised by the study is that the Roma children follow the normal linguistic development path of other children and, by the age of 5, already know the deep structure of complex sentences in Slovak. The results show that although the Roma children grow up with a particular variety of the Slovak language that is an ethnolect, they are able to comprehend and produce deep linguistic structures of Slovak, which serves for them as a mother tongue.

Ako hovorí slovenská mládež v Maďarsku a na Slovensku v súčasnosti? (Bilingválna reflexia)

The intention of this paper is to present the empirical research results of the Slovak youth lingual-communication behaviour in Slovakia and Hungary, whereas this research work was performed in both countries in the year 2010. Expressions of a spoken form of the Slovak language in surroundings were investigated, which is typical for the application of the written language as a form of a social contact in school — with friends, peers, and in family. The referential framework of this article consists of three analytical levels: 1. the analysis of the knowledge level of the Slovak and Hungarian language (in the case of the Slovak language, its lingual appearances are analyzed); 2. intergeneration relations of lingual communication; 3. the analysis of mutual contexts (the dependence on identification signs).

K Niektorým Aspektom Termínu „Archaizmus “

Abstract Main focus of this paper is the issue of notional variability of the term “archaism” which occurs in historical-linguistic and dialectological works with a common denominator - dialects. The basis of the registered notional variability (1. Linguistic phenomenon which carries over from an earlier linguistic period - residual archaism; 2. Dialectal phenomenon which represents older state of language - relict archaism 3. Dialectal phenomenon which is currently receding - synchronic, structural archaism) lies in differences resulting from diachronic (the age of the linguistic phenomenon, diachronic resultativity, residuality/relictness) and synchronic (obsolescence of the linguistic phenomenon, synchronic processuality) approach to the language and its dynamics. The variability of the term archaism according to the approach used (the aspect of the national language, its development vs. the aspect of dialectal system and its structure) is illustrated on the example of linguistic phenomena characteristic for Sotak dialects of the north-eastern Zemplín. During the process of selection of examples from Sotak dialects the fact that the structure of this dialectal system includes, in a concentrated form, linguistic phenomena reflecting an older developmental state of the Slovak language (archaisms from the point of view of national language and its development) was taken into consideration.

Detecting Time Expressions for Bulgarian and Slovak Language from Electronic Text Corpora

The paper presents a comparison of time expressions translations from Slovak to Bulgarian language using existing Bulgarian-Slovak/Slovak-Bulgarian electronic text corpora. It uses techniques of concordances and collocations generation from sentence aligned parallel bilingual text corpora to compare semantic content and related translations. The approach is applicable in language teaching and is useful for teaching less resourced languages.

Квазиоппозиции в текстах и грамматиках XVI–XVIII вв. как маркеры устройства славянской категории одушевленности

This article examines the paradigmatic expression of animacy in the XVI–XVIIIth century Russian, Polish, Slovak and Czech languages. In Russian, animate nouns are marked only by neutralization of the Acc. and the Gen. forms, whereas in Czech, the differentiation of animate and inanimate nouns is marked primarily by different case endings for a single grammatical case. Polish and Slovak use both methods.Some texts and grammars from the early development stages of the modern Slavic literary languages reflect the creation of certain artificial oppositions. These quasioppositions are present in Dmitry Gerasimov’s and Maximus the Greek’s translations of the Church Slavonic Donatus, in the first Polish grammar by Pierre Statorius (1568), in the Czech grammars by Beneš Optat, Petr Gzel and Václav Philomathes (1531), Jan Blahoslav (1571) and Matouš Benešovský (1577), as well as in the Slovak Camaldolese Bible (1756-59).

Training Teacher Trainees of the Slovak Language and Literature Teacher in a Minority Environment

Forms and methods of teaching a second language in a minority environment are reviewed and incorporated in new textbooks and teaching guides. Research and many studies are being conducted in order to form textbooks with a more effective impact on the communicative competence acquisition. Therefore the outcome of teaching and learning the Slovak language may be in accordance with the interest in a second, language of minority students. The aim of minority community education in Slovakia is to develop communicative competence in the Slovak language in addition to keeping the mother tongue as ethno-significant factor with its specific features and linguistic-cultural specificities of a certain ethnic minority.

Romani pupils in Slovakia. Trapped between Romani and Slovak languages

Schatzungen zufolge gehoren bis zu 19 % der Schuler/-innen in der Slowakei zur Roma-Minderheit, ca. zwei Drittel von ihnen sprechen Romanes. Jedoch ist - von wenigen Ausnahmen abgesehen - Romanes nicht Teil des schulischen Curriculums. Ausgehend von Theorien uber die symbolische Macht von Sprache analysiert der Beitrag einerseits die Verwendung von Romanes in der Schule und andererseits die Ansatze des Unterrichtens von Slowakisch als Zweitsprache. Ziel ist es zu prufen, inwiefern proklamierte Sprachenpolitik und Minderheitenrechte praktisch umgesetzt werden. Der Beitrag kommt zu dem Ergebnis, dass die reine Existenz von Minderheitenrechten keine hinreichende Bedingung fur die Umsetzung dieser Rechte ist. Daruber hinaus sind bisherige Masnahmen zur Forderung der Slowakisch-Kenntnisse von Roma-Schuler/inne/n als unbefriedigend einzuschatzen. Dies hat zur Folge, dass viele Schuler/-innen keine der beiden Sprachen ausreichend beherrschen. (DIPF/Orig.) According to estimates, Roma make up to 19 % of pupils in primary and lower secondary education in Slovakia and about two thirds of them speak Romani language at home. Despite this fact, the vast majority of schools do not include Romani in their curriculum. Drawing on theories about the symbolic power of language the paper focuses on the use of the Romani language in the school context as well as on approaches aimed at teaching Slovak as a second language. Its main goal is to examine the application of language policy and minority rights in practice. The paper concludes that as far as the Roma minority is concerned, the de jure existence of minority language rights is not a sufficient condition to ensure the exercise of these rights. The research further revealed that despite the declared emphasis on minority pupils' adequate command of the Slovak language, the practical measures aimed at improving their fluency in Slovak are unsatisfactory. As a result, many Romani pupils risk failing to master any language on the level that would allow them to succeed in school. (DIPF/Orig.)

The making of a midwife: My family's contribution to Aboriginal maternal and child health

The objective of the study was to create several new, original virtual patients (VPs) in the Slovak language, especially for educational purposes in midwifery.Virtual patients have been created for the needs of university midwifery education in Slovakia.The creation of the six virtual patients basically consisted of three fixed stages: preparation, design and development, implementation into the virtual environment. We used the Open Labyrinth (OL) virtual environment, an open-source system for creating VPs. The VPs include six various scenarios of the most common problems seen in midwifery practice: preterm birth, perinatal loss, gestational diabetes, ineffective breastfeeding, postpartum bleeding and sudden home birth.Currently, six original virtual patients are used in university midwifery education in Slovakia. We use them for contact teaching as well as self-study of students. They present the first VPs in Slovakia and the Czech Republic created in academic settings in these countries.The future perspective of a virtual patient as an interactive process between the student and the medium is that it can deepen and improve learning outcomes, solve specific midwifery issues, and reduce mistakes in the clinical environment.

ZAPISOVANIE SLOVENSKÝCH PRIEZVISK V SLOVENSKOM A V SRBSKOM KONTEXTE

V práci sme výskum zamerali na zapisovanie slovenských priezvisk v srbskom kontexte. V súčasnosti je medzi vojvodinskými Slovákmi aktuálnym problémom prepis slovenských priezvisk do srbčiny. V príspevku sme sa zamerali na transkribovanie niektorých slovenských grafém do srbčiny. Naznačili sme rozdiely pri transkribovaní, ktoré sa uvádzajú v normatívnych príručkách a ako je to v praxi. Uviedli sme aj zapisovanie slovenských mien a priezvisk do úradných dokladov v srbskom jazyku. V druhej časti sme sa zamerali na tvorenie prechýlených podôb nielen slovenských priezvisk, ale aj inojazykových v slovenskom kontexte a prípadné odklony. Mužské priezviská majú najčastejšie formu substantív ako pomenovaní samostatne existujúcich substancií. Len zriedka majú adjektívnu podobu. Ženské priezviská majú všetky formu privlastňovacieho prídavného mena na -ova/-ová/-a. V ďalšej časti v príspevku sme sa zamerali na používanie priezvisk v slovenskom kontexte v každodennej praxi.

ISTORIJSKI PREGLED UDŽBENIKA NA SLOVAČKOM JEZIKU U VOJVODINI DO 1945. GODINE

U radu je prikazan pregled udžbenika koji su se koristili u slovačkim školama u Vojvodini od doseljavanja Slovaka na ove prostore (1745) do 1945.god. U početku su se koristili udžbenici za evangeliste, koji su dolazili iz današnje Slovačke ili udžbenici čiji su autori bili Slovaci koji su živeli na prostoru današnje Madjarske. Prvi udžbenik na slovačkom jeziku u ovoj sredini je napisao Samuel Borovský 1853.god. koji je bio evangelički sveštenik u slovačkom selu Pivnice. Posle osnivanja štamparije u Bačkom Petrovcu (1919.g.), počeli su da se štampaju udžbenici na slovačkom jeziku čiji autori su bili učitelji iz ove sredine. Prvu čitanku je sastavio Štefan Kvas 1920. godine, a kao autor je bio najviše zastupljen Ferdinand Klátik koji je u kratkom periodu (1928-1932) sastavio sedam udžbenika.

“Because Slovaks are the best people in the world and the Slovak language is the most beautiful language in the world”: Defamiliarising the Slovak “Imagined Community” in Samko Tále’s Cemetery Book

Abstract National identity and language have been understood to be inseparable. This claim is supported by the history of the Slovak language, notably the codification attempts made by Anton Bernolák and Ľudovít Štúr as part of the Slovak National Revival Movement. National community tends to be perceived as being defined and categorized by a unified language, or by a homogenous grammar and lexicon shared equally among the community members. This concept of speech-national communities, I propose, is deconstructed in Daniela Kapitáňová’s Samko Tále’s Cemetery Book (Kniha o cintoríne), published in Slovak in 2000 and translated into English by Julia Sherwood in 2010. Through Samko’s pedantic engagement in Aristotelian categorization of knowledge, in his obsessive attempt to illustrate his (antilogical) logic of what it means to be a Slovak and to be part of a community which has gone through dramatic changes in history, tenets and beliefs which are unquestioningly accepted as truth are mercilessly defamiliarized, or “made strange”. Samko Tále’s Cemetery Book corresponds with Benedict Anderson’s notion of human communities as imagined entities in which people “will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion”.