Text: A Short News Item

News writing is one of the most useful registers to read early, because it is grammatically clean, repetitive in its structures, and everywhere. A two-line news brief packs in several constructions that look hard in a textbook but become automatic once you have seen them in their natural home. This page takes a single short item apart sentence by sentence.

The text

Včera byl v Praze otevřen nový most. Podle starosty stavba trvala dva roky.

"Yesterday a new bridge was opened in Prague. According to the mayor, the construction took two years."

Two sentences, and inside them: a participial passive, a fronted time adverb, the locative of place, a reported-speech phrase, a feminine past tense, and a counted noun after a numeral. We will take them in order.

Sentence one: Včera byl v Praze otevřen nový most.

byl otevřen — the participial passive

The heart of the sentence is byl otevřen, "was opened." Czech builds this kind of passive from two pieces: the verb být ("to be") plus a short passive participle. Here byl is the past of být (masculine singular), and otevřen is the short passive participle of otevřít ("to open"). Together they say that the bridge underwent the opening — somebody opened it, but the report does not name who, which is exactly what a passive is for.

The participle agrees with the subject like an adjective. The subject is most ("bridge"), a masculine inanimate noun, singular — so the participle is the bare masculine singular otevřen, with no ending. Change the subject and the participle changes:

Note the short form otevřen, not the long adjective otevřený. The short participle is the verbal, event form used with být in the passive ("was opened, the act"), while the long otevřený is a plain adjective describing a state ("open"). News Czech wants the event, so it uses the short form. For the full picture see the participial passive.

Word order: why the subject comes last

English would say "A new bridge was opened in Prague yesterday," subject first. The Czech sentence opens with Včera ("yesterday") and parks the subject nový most at the very end. This is normal, even preferred, in news Czech: the new information — what was opened — lands in the final, most emphatic slot, while the time adverb sets the scene up front. The auxiliary byl sits in the second-position zone right after Včera, where Czech likes to keep its little verbs.

v Praze — the locative of place

V Praze ("in Prague") is the locative, the case Czech uses after v and na to say where something is. Praha shifts its stem (h → z) and takes the locative ending: v Praze. The locative never appears without its preposition, which is why it is the one case Czech schoolchildren learn with a little o in front of it.

Sentence two: Podle starosty stavba trvala dva roky.

podle starosty — reporting with "according to"

Podle means "according to / following," and it is one of the workhorse prepositions of journalism: podle policie (according to the police), podle ministerstva (according to the ministry), podle svědků (according to witnesses). It governs the genitive. Here the source is starosta ("mayor"), which — being a male-person noun in -a — is a masculine animate noun of the předseda type; its genitive is starosty.

Podle starosty lets the reporter attribute the claim without vouching for it — the two years are the mayor's figure, not the newspaper's.

trvala — the past tense and l-participle agreement

Trvala is the past tense of trvat ("to last, to take time"). Czech forms the past with an l-participle, and that participle agrees in gender and number with the subject. The subject is stavba ("construction work"), a feminine singular noun, so the participle is the feminine trvala (l-participle + -a). A masculine subject would give trval, a neuter one trvalo, and the agreement rules run all the way through.

dva roky — counting with the small numerals

Dva roky is "two years." After dva, tři, čtyři the counted noun stays in the nominative/accusative plural — it is just a plain plural, as if you were listing the things. So rok ("year") becomes roky, and the numeral dva is the masculine form agreeing with the masculine rok (a feminine noun would take dvě: dvě hodiny; see dva vs dvě).

The contrast to remember: from pět ("five") upward the noun jumps to the genitive plural, and rok even switches to a different stem — pět let ("five years"), not pět roků. So dva roky but pět let.

Reported speech keeps the original tense

The English speaker's instinct, when turning podle starosty into a full "the mayor said that…" clause, is to backshift: "The mayor said the construction had taken two years." Czech does not backshift. The reported verb keeps the tense the speaker actually used (see reported speech with no backshift):

In that second example English shifts present → past ("is" → "was"), but Czech leaves je untouched: the mayor said "it is finished," and the report preserves his present tense word for word.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• The news passive is být + short participle (byl otevřen), and the participle agrees with the subject: most byl otevřen, silnice byla otevřena, letiště bylo otevřeno.
• News word order fronts the time adverb and pushes the new subject to the end: Včera byl v Praze otevřen nový most.
• Podle ("according to") takes the genitive and attributes a claim: podle starosty, podle policie, podle meteorologů.
• Past tense uses an l-participle agreeing in gender: stavba trvala (fem.), festival trval (masc.).
• After dva/tři/čtyři the noun is the plain plural (dva roky); from pět up it is the genitive plural (pět let).
• Czech reported speech does not backshift — it keeps the speaker's original tense.