Strč prst skrz krk

Common card · No. 494473

Strč prst skrz krk (pronounced [str̩tʃ pr̩st skr̩s kr̩k] ) is a tongue twister in Czech and Slovak meaning 'stick a finger through the neck'. The sentence is well known for being a semantically and syntactically valid clause without a single vowel, the nucleus of each syllable being a syllabic r, a common feature among many Slavic languages. It is often used as an example of such a phrase when learning Czech or Slovak as a foreign language. In addition to the syllabic r, Czech and Slovak both feature another syllabic liquid consonant — the syllabic l. Czech also has a syllabic /m/ in words like sedm (/ˈsɛdm̩/). As a result, the two languages have plenty of words that phonemically lacks a vowel. Examples of long words of this type are scvrnkls () 'you (m.) flicked (something) away', čtvrthrst 'quarter handful', and čtvrtsmršť 'quarter whirlwind', the latter two being artificial, though grammatical, constructs unlikely to occur spontaneously. There are other examples of vowelless sentences...

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