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The Koutecky name has two legitimate variants in Czech and a host of creative distortions in renderings of it by non-Czechs. This page addresses the written and spoken variants of the name.
Czech family names have both a masculine and a feminine form. The feminine form is usually generated by adding "á" or "ová" to the root form of the name. The correct Czech masculine form of the name is spelled Koutecký, and the feminine form is spelled Koutecká
The ou is pronounced almost as in the o in the English word go, although there is a very slight "oo" as in loop after the o. (The Czech o by itself is something like the au in the English word caught.)
The e is pronounced as in the e in the English word let.
The c is pronounced as if it were a ts in English.
The acute accent on the final y (or a in the feminine form) indicates that the vowel sound is to be held for an extra length.
So, using English words, the name is pronounced as Coe-tet-ski-i, where the final i is as in the English word ski but not quite held a full extra length. The first two syllables are about equally accented, thus something like COE-TET-ski-i.
In English, there are no accented letters. And only the father's form of the name is used. Thus the standard English spelling of the name, for both men and women, is KOUTECKY.
English-speaking people (such as census takers or registrars of births) who hear the name, with its original pronunciation, hear something that they might write down as Coatesky or Koteski. Those who see the written name Koutecky are often inclined to pronounce it Kotecki (which is how Harry's family have apparently come to pronounce it -- you get frustrated after a while trying to explain to people that they are misprouncing your name and just give in to the common mis-pronunciation).
Indexers of written records who have difficulty reading the handwriting create even more distortions.
The result is that all of the following forms of the name have appeared in U. S. records or in indexes of U. S. records. (And there are probably even more variants that I have not even discovered yet.)
These are not different actual forms of the name. They are mis-spellings of the name written down by an unknowledgable census taker or birth registrar or indexer of records.
There was also the fact that as recently as the early to mid 1800's there often were no "correct" standard spellings of names in European records. However, by the late 1800's when Peter Koutecky's family was in the U. S., standardized spellings of names were more of a fact. So this lack of a standard spelling that was often true prior to the mid 1800's is really not a factor in this case.
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