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The problem is not unique, but it's uniquely persistent among the languages that I'm more-or-less familiar with. “Foreign names can get inconsistently mangled
by aasasd 7y ago
The problem is not unique, but it's uniquely persistent among the languages that I'm more-or-less familiar with.
“Foreign names can get inconsistently mangled in Czech”—but to my knowledge Czech doesn't attempt to preserve foreign spelling, with e.g. letters Ñ or Ø. Czech adapts spelling to native pronunciation, which is my entire point. The ‘mistake’ here is that English keeps doing things backwards, and ‘Čapek’ is just one example here.
I had to look up the usage of ‘W’ in Czech, and Wikipedia says: “The letters Q, W and X are used exclusively in foreign words, and the former two are replaced with Kv and V once the word becomes ‘naturalized’.”
There's a close example in Russian: John ‘Dr.’ Watson's surname can be pronounced either ‘Vahtson’ or ‘Oo-ohtson’, but there's no intermediate sound like English ‘W’ in Russian (and no letter for it). So the name was spelled either of the two ways in print until it became settled on ‘Vahtson’ (‘Ватсон‘), which fits more naturally in the rest of the language. I expect a similar thing to happen to ‘Williams’ in Czech, though I'm surprised that they still have trouble with it at all, as the surname is old and widespread. However, current strong influence of English can mess things up—people, including myself, use English pronunciation even in the context of a native language.
- smcl 7y agoThat quote from wikipedia is interesting, because it says something you're interpreting as a being a consistent and simple rule but it's actually really vague and ill-defined - basically "Q, W and X are preserved in foreign words for a while until they're not". Another example, place names are often localized even if they don't contain a non-Czech letter: Venice=>Benátky, Paris=>Pařiž, London=>Londýn, and so on. And sometimes original place names are left in place when they do have a letter or letters that are not Czech (or not very Czech) - see Washington, New York, Sydney, Chicago. In fact the last one is particularly interesting, since "ch" is considered a single letter in Czech - and there's a pretty perfect mapping to the Czech alphabet that preserves the stress on the "a" in "Chicago": Šikágo. "Venice" is interesting too since "-ice" is a common place-name suffix. It behaves quite weirdly - sometimes it's singular (e.g. Lednice) and sometimes plural (e.g. Valtice). This becomes fun when you start to decline them so "I'm going (by vehicle) to Lednice" is "Jedu do Lednice" and to Valtice it's "Jedu do Valtic" (note: no "e" at the end). And the Venice/Benátky is apparently plural (http://prirucka.ujc.cas.cz/?slovo=Ben%C3%A1tky http://prirucka.ujc.cas.cz/?slovo=Ben%C3%A1tky). Why, I do not know. This is unrelated to the original discussion of course - just an interesting aside :-)
- trickstra 7y ago> Why, I do not know In Czech language even names of cities have genders. So the endings of the words are based on the gender. And Lednice - "do Lednice" is singular, while Valtice - "do Valtic" is plural. There are even some cities where locals use it as singular while the rest of Czechs use it as plural and they tease each other at parties.
- zajio1am 7y ago> but to my knowledge Czech doesn't attempt to preserve foreign spelling, with e.g. letters Ñ or Ø. Czech adapts spelling to native pronunciation, which is my entire point. In Czech, adapting spelling to native pronounciation (or adapting pronounciation to native spelling) is done for common nouns, but generally not for proper nouns (esp. names of persons) from languages written in (variants of) Latin alphabet. These are either written as is, or (informally) stripped of 'foreign' parts regardless of pronounciation (e.g. Ñ->N, Ü->U, or Ø->O). One exception is feminine suffix -ová added to female last names, as that is necessary for declension.