Why does Czech have two different verbs for “to marry”?

Czech splits the English verb “to marry” into two gendered verbs. A woman uses vdát se (related to vdaná, “married woman, given away”). A man uses oženit se (related to žena, “wife”). When a couple gets married together, you can say vzít se (“to take each other”). Polish and Slovak make the same split; most Romance and Germanic languages don’t.

In this clip, a TV host reads a questionnaire that a husband filled out for his wife. The funniest answer: he wrote that the most valuable thing his wife had done in life was vdát se (“get married, in the woman’s way”). The host teases him for putting the marriage front and center.