Orð og tunga - 01.06.2016, Page 137

Marie Novotná: Adaptation of foreign words into Czech 127
4.3 Transcription and declension of Old Norse proper
names
The problems of transcription of Old Norse proper names, as well as
the grammatical problems, have recently been described theoretically
by Novotná & Starý (2014), where all pros and cons of each possible
solution have been listed, and in every question, one solution has
been chosen. For Old Norse masculine names, we (Novotná & Starý
2014) decided to use the nominative without nominative ending as
the basis for Czech declension, in order to prevent creation of forms
where the Old Norse endings would be combined with Czech end-
ings of oblique cases (Grett irovi, Oláfrova etc.) – this is generally what
Czech users without any knowledge of Old Norse grammar tend to
invent. The same principle can be used for female names, where the
change to the stem occurs, causing the gen. of Gunnlǫð to become
Gunnlaðar and gen. of Ǫgn to become Agnar. By deciding not to adopt
the ‘harsh’ solution that has been practiced in Czech classical philol-
ogy for many years, that is to keep the original nominative forms and
to create oblique cases by adding Czech endings to the original stem
(nom. Ceres, gen. Cerery; nom. Zeus, gen. Dia), we wished to prevent
the risk that a Czech reader would not be able to identify the nomi-
native (Ǫgn) with oblique cases (Agny, Agně) in his or her own lan-
guage. Also for place names that are originally in plural, we (Novotná
& Starý 2014) proposed to use nom. sing. without nom. ending as the
basis for Czech declension.
5 Conclusion
Due to the rich infl ectional system in Czech, all loanwords tend to
be integrated into one of the declension paradigms. Accepting loan-
words is thus a long process, which can be traced in a gradual adapta-
tion of their transcription to the Czech spelling. Most of the loanwords
from Icelandic and Old Norse have already “found their declensions”
and are transcribed as they are pronounced in Czech.
There is a relatively extensive organized language management in
Czech, focused on spelling that goes back to the national movement,
and there are relatively large diff erences between Standard Czech and
Common Czech. An att empt by Novotná & Starý (2014) to harmonize
the translated forms of Old Norse proper names can be perceived as
a continuation of this language tradition.
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