Why, no, I didn't ask him where he got it.
What it did inspire, though, is the From which language did English get that Name game.
English mostly got geographic names from French, with Slavic language words transliterated into German. (The only spelling I would be willing to simplify would be Chaikovsky. Although that's not as recognizable as Tschaikowsky, even though the difference is one of transliteration again.) This is why French cities are the same in English and French, but Italian cities have extra letters and odd pronunciations, and some German cities are rendered mumbly in English.
So. How'd the 'z' get into 'Czech'? Czech has supplementary diacritical marks to indicate pronunciation--the reader has to know how to pronounce the word. Probably the Polish side; Polish has 'cz' and 'sz' although 'zs' seems to be mostly Magyar. French has 'ch' but in the days when French was a heavy influence on English, that region was called Bohemia, so that's no help. Dvorak (one of the three Czech composers who wrote in this curious rhythm) is known to be pronounced Dvor-zhak, with a swoop on the o and a dingbat on the r, but somebody somewhere decided that wasn't going to work for the name of the country.
Mmmmm, research...
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