my online boyfriend is from a landlocked slav drunkland called czech republic. i know his official/passport/birth certificate name, but i don't know how to call him. whenever i asked, "how should I call your name?" he said, "it depends on the context of the sentence."
i was like, "what?"
and then he told me that there are 7 cases in czech language, which means a person name can have 7 different versions. for example, Tomáš can be Tomáš, Tomáša, Tomášovi, Tomáše, Tomášem. it's called noun declension. in order to know the declension, you have to identify the noun gender, stem, if it's singular or plural, and ofc the grammatical case. then you go through the pattern and some exceptions, then you'll know how a noun is declined.
czech language is so fucking hard. it's so specific and efficient, that you can say in a word, what you can say in 1 sentence in English/Indonesian/most language i know.
a simple example would be the word "nerozumají" = "they do not understand"
they put prefix and suffix in everything, every word changes in every sentence. everything has genders and contexts and whatever. you can not just say 'go' in czech, even the word 'go' in czech has to contain some contexts, like if the person 'go by walking' or 'go by some kind of vehicle', and then if the person 'go leaving place X' or 'go arriving to place X'.
due to all the complexities i ended up calling him 'you'. i never call his name because he has 7 names and i don't know which one to use.
czech declension is so bizzare that parents of newborns have to pick their babies name from a list of names provided by the czech government. because otherwise the declension system will gets fckd up. if you choose to pick another name, doesn't fit the declension rule, the name will most likely be treated as a foreign name.
now i know why there are so many men named Jan in chess.
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