Adaptation of foreign words into Czech

The case of Icelandic proper names

Abstract

The article gives an overview of the history of Czech, and Czech language planning, focusing on the history of how foreign words, both loanwords and proper names, are rendered in Czech. The typological profile of Czech, a highly inflectional language, makes it generally problematic to adapt loanwords to the language, regardless of language policy.

There is a relatively extensive organized language management in Czech, and there is a strong focus on standardized spelling. The Rules of Czech spelling have in the 20^th century treated spelling of loanwords as well as of foreign proper names and place names. In this context, the results of my research on the history of rendering Icelandic names in Czech are presented. While in translations from Old Norse, there is a growing consensus that original forms should be retained, and that word stems without nominative endings should be used as basis for the Czech declension, no attempt is found in translations of modern Icelandic literature to systematise the rendering of proper names; nevertheless, some tendencies can be traced, such as omitting nom. masc. ending in Czech oblique cases.