Czech Forms of Foreign Proper Names Viewed by the Public

Abstract

The paper is based on the enquiries addressed to the Language Consulting Centre of the Czech Language Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, which have been published (together with the relevant answers) in an online database, enabling its users to carry out detailed searches thanks to elaborate linguistic annotation. The focus is on enquiries related to Czech forms of foreign proper names, especially toponyms. The queries concerning this topic are analysed not only from the quantitative point of view (i.e. what categories and types of names, along with which source languages, cause problems most frequently), but particularly from the point of view of the enquirers’ attitudes to the issues they discuss. Besides the cases when the client only tries to obtain certain information, enquiries connected with uncertainty about the appropriateness of the usage of Czech forms of foreign proper names are recorded; these queries are sometimes connected with the explicit negative criticism of these phenomena.