Re: Digraphs in old Czech spelling

On Jul 15, 9:04 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jul 15, 8:58 am, António Marques <m...@xxxxxxx> wrote:



Peter T. Daniels wrote:
On Jul 15, 7:36 am, António Marques<m...@xxxxxxx>  wrote:
António Marques wrote:
Panu wrote:
On Jul 15, 7:24 am, "PaulJK"<paul.kr...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>  wrote:

I cannot prove that Austrians never ever spelled the part
of the Empire they knew as Böhmen with a<Cz>, because
the 19th century Polish spelled it that way and that English
writers latched onto such rare spelling and borrowed it into
English. If I understood you correctly, that is what you
proposed happened. I just feel it's somewhat unlikely.

Well, what I propose is that the spelling got from Polish into German
and then English. The Google search for Czechoslowakei for instance
returns several antiquarian booksellers' web pages, which IMHO
strongly suggests that the Cz- orthography has earlier had at least
some currency in German.

Given that the ultimate source of cz is old czech anyway, and all those
people were in contact with each other for centuries, I think your
hypothesis is wittgensteinianly untractable.

For instance, some of the first people using 'czech' is english may have
followed the old czech spelling. Others may have followed your putative
german. Yet others may have followed polish. The english word only
caught on because all of those people were using it simultaneously. How
does one go on about determining the near origin of the spelling? It's
an impossible/meaningless question.-

But that doesn't account for why they would have switched from
"Bohemian" to "Czech" (why not "Check"?) at all.

Why not "check" seems easy, 1) it would have homographs and 2) Czechs
are european and use the latin alphabet, so it's sensible to use the
exotic spelling (even if it weren't, ultimately or not, czech in
origin). *Czeck would do, but it looks like something from Russia or the
Ukraine.-

You're just avoiding the main question -- why not "Bohemian"?

Bohemia is the western part of Czech country. The eastern part is
called Moravia, and its unofficial capital is a city called Brno, or
Brünn in German. So, all Czech speaking people are not Bohemians.

There is also the fact that Bohemians could, until 1945, also be
German speakers from Bohemia. The term "Sudetendeutsche" was recent
coinage in the thirties, "Böhmen" or "Böhmendeutsche" was used by
people who were not supportive of Konrad Henlein's Sudeten German
Party.
.

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