FROM ONE LANGUAGE TO ANOTHER |
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The problem with taking a name from one language to another is multifaceted. The problem started when our immigrant ancestors boarded an English ship where personnel recorded their names on the passenger list. When they arrived in America, immigration clerks made a record of each incoming person. Then as he or his descendants moved or relocated, other clerks repeated the process. Today we have to cope with how our ancestor spelled his name – if he did – we may knowingly or unknowingly be living with what English-speaking officials made of each travelers name. Ship captains and clerks, courthouse officials, tax collectors, church pastors, and census takers all wrote down what they thought they heard. It is interesting to ask whether officials ever asked an immigrant how his name was spelled. The translation problem was improved in the 1800s; there were so many more immigrants by then, and many officials had German backgrounds themselves. The matter of garbled names probably causes genealogists and historians more trouble than it did our ancestors. In retrospect, it would have been wiser if immigrants had been asked to spell their name for the officials. But then our ancestors would have used the German letters of the alphabet. Since we recite the alphabet beginning “aye, bee, see”; the German is “ah, bay, tsay,” so the same letter of the alphabet does not represent the same sound in different languages. Furthermore, a language may have a sound that cannot be spelled in another language, because it does not have that sound. We must accept that those record keepers did the best they could with what they had. We found up to half a dozen different spellings of the same name, leading us to question whether it is the same name. To be sure, we needed to know whether we were sorting out three generations of a family in the same area, or tracking them back from Wisconsin to New York. We learned that the best way is to go by the sound, not by the spellings.
German Respelling Comment Schneider Snyder Change ei to y Snider Change ei to i Theiss Tice Change to i Heilmann Hailman Change to long a sound
The diphthong ei and the long e spelling ie are not interchangeable in German usage, but have been used and misused quite indiscriminately in early America.
German Pronounced Zaeger tseeg-er Zaeger tsyg-er
The eu diphthong has the sound of English oi, oy, a sound that almost never survived in Anglicized spellings.
German Respelled Comment Freund Friend translation Heu Hay, Hoy Hay is translation Heuer Heier, Hoyer Neuhaus Newhouse translation Neukirch Newkirk means “new church”; kirk is Scots form of church translation Neumann Newman translation
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