hydronyms, euphony, onomastics, quantitative linguistics, sociolinguistics

The paper focuses on the euphonic character of hydronyms, which is researched from two perspectives. The corpus comprises two sets of Czech river, pond, and spring names taken from the Ostravice river basin (the Moravian-Silesian Region), and the Morava river basin (the Zlín Region, the Olomouc Region, the South-Moravian Region), respectively. As to the methods, first, euphony values of the water names are computed on the grounds of a formula which is used in analysing poetry. Second, a questionnaire survey was carried out, in which secondary-school and university students were asked to order selected hydronyms according to their own perceptions of euphoniousness. The results of both investigations are compared, and several conclusions are drawn from their interplay.