as a linguistics major taking my first intro class into the subject, this post made me very happy and excited.

based on everything i’ve seen so far on czech phonology (from phonologists), it basically is. the only problem is that announcers (et cetera) tend to lengthen that first vowel sound pretty substantially (perhaps because we don’t use the true short version of it very often in american english), and czech actually does differentiate between short and long versions of the same vowel, so if you really wanted to be correct, you’d need to ensure that you didn’t lengthen it. i have a little czech phrasebook and it tells to pronounce the czech u as the sound in “book” but this is untrue for american english speakers. for british speakers i think it works (it’s close enough, anyway), which may be why it seems to be preferred in pronunciation guides. but according to every inventory of czech phonology i’ve been able to find, it is (in International Phonetic Alphabet terms) /u/ which is not the sound typical american english speakers have in “book” (that vowel sound is slightly lower and slightly further forward than /u/, articulatorily speaking). this was perhaps too much information. 😛