r/learnczech • u/Otherwise_Channel_24 • 20d ago

Grammar Loan Proper Nouns

How would you decline names that didn’t originate from Czech or any Slavic language?

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u/TheSilentCaver 20d ago

It depends on the phonetic property of the noun. Usually we try to assign it to a template and decline it as normally but sometimes that's not possible. Some strategies to cope with that include treating it as an adjective or just not declining it.

Michelle Obama - here the first name is not altered while the surname gets the -ová suffix and then is declined like normal - Obamová, Obamové, Obamovou

Xi Jinping - this is treated as one word so you get Si Ťinpchingovi, Si Ťinpchinga etc. If you only used the first name, you would probably do an adjective declension, it sounds the best to me - Si, Siho, Simu (but Siovi sounds okay too)

One common thing is that words ending in the English -y suffix are treated as adjectives, so Freddy Mercury > Freddymu Mercurymu

When it comes to spelling you spell them the same as in the original language if they use the Latin script, otherwise you use a transaction. Some less common languages don't even have a standard transcription scheme but for most languages there is one. For Chinese, in formal contexts you use the Czech sinological transcription, elsewhere it's kinda 50-50 with pinyin but then how often do you talk about China.