David Cooper (Slavic Languages Professor)

And back then, which was before Google Search, when you just searched in your Netscape browser or you used Yahoo Search,

I was top of the results page, right?

Because there were very few people that had their own pages at that time.

Right.

It was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, right?

Yeah.

So there was some... This was a point in time when you couldn't study Czech in school.

It was Czech's Bohemia.

The Bohemian Kingdom was part of Austro-Hungary.

Education was in German.

And...

Czech language was associated with religious reform, and it had sort of been suppressed.

And so Czech patriots were interested in sort of reviving the language and getting people using it more.

A couple of them, one of the things they did was to create a series of manuscripts that looked like medieval manuscripts of Czech poetry from a period long before there was other evidence of any use of the Czech language.

And the idea was, hey, we have a language and a literary culture that's as old as German.

language culture and we can compete with them.

And we competed with them in the past.

So why are we all speaking in German and writing in German now?

We should be writing in Czech and speaking in Czech.

Yes.