The article deals with the morphological character of the Czech noun with the first person plural form šéry (‘skerries’). It is based on the observation that standard Czech codification sources contained the word šéry only as an inanimate masculine noun šér, but corpora also show its considerable use as a feminine noun. A corpus analysis is thus carried out in order to find out whether the codification was justified or whether the non-codified variant is frequent enough to suggest that both of the variants are partly normative among the users of standard Czech. The paper shows that in some cases, even when the gender of the word cannot be determined, it can in fact be identified unambiguously on the basis of other occurrences of the word in the same text/source. The paper arrives at the conclusion that both of the variants are part of the standard Czech norm.
The article is concerned with the graphic aspect of acronym usage in standard written Czech. It focuses on the abbreviations which can be pronounced not only when spelled out, but also as a single unit. The survey examines the competition of various acronyms’ declension forms in particular case positions, both in the case of abbreviations ending with a consonant (type ČEZ) and those ending with a vowel (types UNESCO and IKEA) for which contemporary handbooks and linguistic description allow the addition of case endings only in spoken Czech. The study shows that some types of acronyms also tend to be declined in standard written Czech contexts and analyzes the tension between preserving the abbreviation’s graphic integrity and treating it as an ordinary word written in lower case form. The results lead to the adjustment of some existing statements on acronyms.
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