Czechia (pronunciation?)

[Alice Faber]

Steve Kl. said:
>On Mon, 7 Jan 2002, Barnhart wrote:
>
>> Is the second consonant cluster pronounced as an affricate or stop?  If
>> the former it may be dangerously close to Chechnya, mightn't it?
>
>'ch' is an affricate.
>
>However, the adjective is (in nom sing masc form) cesky (with a hacek over
>the c and a long y). Czech republic is "Ceska' republika" with the stop
>[k]. The Bohemian parts are "Cechy" with that affricate.
>
>Also, in Czech, you don't really see the place names ending in -ia:
>
>Czechoslovakia = Ceskoslovensko
>Slovakia = Slovensko
>Slovenia = Slovinsko
>Poland = Polsko
>Hungary = Madarsko
>Silesia = Slezsko (or something similar, I don't recall exactly)
>Italy = Italsko
>Spain = Spanielsko
>
>So it would be weird, in Czech, to use the word Czechia. The equivalent
>would be along the lines of Cesko.

I think it's odd that the earliest English language citation for the form
Czechia that anyone could find was from the Jerusalem Post. My Hebrew
dictionaries are rather incomplete when it comes to European place names,
but I'm pretty sure that, in Hebrew, Czechia referred to Czechoslovakia in
its entirety. Of course the only citation I can find, in a list of coins of
different countries, is for Czechoslovakia. Go figure.