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Mořský ježek, What's In a Name?
Of the droves of eager blog readers jamming my precious bandwidth (cue laughtrack), one has asked whence comes the title of this webspace? What, if anything, is a mořský ježek? Here is the answer.
Mořský is an adjective derived from the word moře, sea, and ježek is Czech for hedgehog. A Czech “sea hedgehog” is sea urchin in English. I found this by chance while looking up ježek in my Czech-English dictionary. Ježek is also a Czech family name, as in Jaroslav Ježek (1906–1942), one of my favorite Czech composers. He wrote classical music and songs with jazz influence in the 1920s and ’30s. When I saw the note in the dictionary’s entry on ježek that said (mořský ~, sea urchin) it stuck in my mind. At least since Shakespeare wrote about the “coasts of Bohemia,” Czechs have had a we-have-no-sea inferiority complex. The country is landlocked, and there is a strange fascination with “the sea.” So the name was a great combination of a bizarre Czech obsession and my interest in Czech music.
Mořský is an adjective derived from the word moře, sea, and ježek is Czech for hedgehog. A Czech “sea hedgehog” is sea urchin in English. I found this by chance while looking up ježek in my Czech-English dictionary. Ježek is also a Czech family name, as in Jaroslav Ježek (1906–1942), one of my favorite Czech composers. He wrote classical music and songs with jazz influence in the 1920s and ’30s. When I saw the note in the dictionary’s entry on ježek that said (mořský ~, sea urchin) it stuck in my mind. At least since Shakespeare wrote about the “coasts of Bohemia,” Czechs have had a we-have-no-sea inferiority complex. The country is landlocked, and there is a strange fascination with “the sea.” So the name was a great combination of a bizarre Czech obsession and my interest in Czech music.
Posted 06 November 2005 at 15:04.
A graduate student in music and anthropology writing a dissertation about music in Moravia, the eastern third of the Czech Republic. At some point, the Czech Republic's "second city" (that would be Brno) captured my attention, and I've since been blogging about events, arts, music, and other stuff—basically whatever interests me in and around the cityscape. I'm not living in Brno now, but I keep up with the cultural pulse from afar as best I can.
Comments:
I was wondering when someone would ask about that. It didn't seem automatically music related even though Ježek did cross the Atlantic.
4:20 PM, November 06, 2005
I agree about the image of the sea-hedgehog. While I like sea urchins, I too had visions of the mořský ježek being a special kind of aquatic hedgehog, sort of like North American marsh and swamp rabbits that (according to my North American Mammals guide) like to swim.
7:19 PM, November 06, 2005
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