I was under the impression
that one of the factors why transgressives are nowadays not widely used in
Czech is their complexity and their inflexions for gender and number. Like
Polish and Russian, Slovak transgressives, as I have learned recently, in spite of
their relative simplicity, seem to be used even less than in Czech.
A Polish sentence like
Słuchając muzyki,
czytał/czytała/czytali/czytały (Listening to music, he/she/they (males
or mixed group)/they (females only) read (past tense)
where słuchając is the
trangressive of the verb słuchać, to listen, would have only one
possible transgressive in Russian:
Слушая музыку, читал/читала/читали.
In very rough transliteration and following a Slavic pattern: Slušaja muzyku,
čital/čitala/čitali, where elements around slashes refer to a male, a female
and plural,
and also only one form in
Slovak:
Počúvajúc hudbu/muziku,
čítal/čítala/čítali (elements around slashes as in Russian above)
But three different
transgressives in Czech according to the gender and number of the subject to
which they refer:
Poslouchaje hudbu/muziku, četl si (he read)
Poslouchajíc hudbu/muziku, četla si. (she read)
Poslouchajíce hudbu/muziku, četli si. (they read – males or
mixed group)
Poslouchajíce hudbu/muziku, četly si. (they read – females
only)
Poslouchajíce hudbu/muziku, četla si. (they read – plural
neuter) It could be girls, děvčata, for example.
Muzika is a more colloquial word than hudba both
in Czech and in Slovak.
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