Attaching a feminine ending to a woman's name is not peculiar to Czech, Blazkova points out. It's common in other Slavic tongues, including Russian, in which women add an "a" to their surnames.
Outside their own countries, the practice can lead to annoying mix-ups. Immigration officers sometimes fail to grasp that a man and woman are actually married because their names aren't exactly the same. One Czech couple, trying to check in to a hotel in Turkey, nearly had to sleep in separate rooms when the conservative proprietor refused at first to believe they were legally wed.
Inside the Czech Republic, the confusion goes the other way. People make Lucie Kundra repeat her name, or ask whether she's married to a foreigner. When she explains that she and her husband are both Czech, some interlocutors demand point-blank why she chose not to conform to accepted style.
That, and the initial displeasure of her mother, who had advised her against thumbing her nose at tradition (she's come around now), has been the only negative consequence thus far for Kundra.
Not so for Zuzana Kocumova, an Olympic cross-country skier who found out just what some segments of Czech society would and wouldn't tolerate.
As a sometime TV sports commentator, Kocumova refused to add "ova" to the names of foreign skiers. It wasn't out of feminist principles necessarily, but rather because she thought it ridiculous to "Czech-ify" the names of non-Czech women, as is standard procedure here. (The U.S. secretary of State is always referred to as Hillary Clintonova, the chancellor of Germany as Angela Merkelova and she of erratic pop-star behavior as Britney Spearsova.)
Being personally acquainted with foreign skiers made Kocumova all the more determined to refer to them by their names exactly as given.
"These are their names in the start lists and results lists everywhere," Kocumova said. "It was unnatural for me to use the Czech form. I couldn't do it."
During the FIS Nordic World Ski Championships in February, held near Prague, the Czech capital, some viewers wrote in to complain about Kocumova's refusal to append "ova" to female skiers' names during her commentary. She was unmoved, and kept doing it her way.
The television station fired her.
Steamed, Kocumova took her story to the press, prompting enough of an outcry over her dismissal that, barely a day later, the station took her back. In an English-language opinion piece, a Czech media website dubbed the TV station's treatment of Kocumova an "ova-reaction."
That was a sign that attitudes might be shifting a bit, at least with regard to the habit of forcing foreign women's names to fit the Czech mold.
Abandoning the convention for the names of Czech women, however, will require a far bigger shake-up of both language and mentality.
Nevertheless, some feminists dream of a day when women here will be able to identify themselves however they please, with gender-specific suffixes a relic of a less enlightened past.
Ova and out.
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henry.chu@latimes.com
