[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Name translations

[Reiner Kerp]

Dear fellow searchers,

> He said "The German spelling" ....

as people hate diacritical characters, there are always problems with 
"German Names" not only in polish records. I think, in russsian records it´s 
the same. And, as time went by, even the German spelling changed. Another 
source of influence is the local dialect. You may hardly find RULES for 
this.

We find many "Translations" from German into Polish like

Fröhlich (German) => Ochocinski (in a Polish record I found "Jana Ochocinski 
vel Fröhlich")

or just "adjustments" because of the different pronounciation of vowels (E 
instead of A or U instad of O), like:

Amalie (German) => Emilia (Polish)
or
LANZ (German) => LENZ (Polish)

KRAHN (German) => KRENZ (Polish).

This is faking, because the names are pronounced identically.

Additional problems are caused by "standardisation-agreements" like 
replacing the unloved german ß by ss.

I don´t know exactly when, the old "h-s" in German script was replaced by 
"ß". Which leads to mistakes, because the lengthening effect of the h was 
lost. In an earlier mail I already mentioned the "archaic-speaking" Franz 
Josef Strauß - a former German minister of defence. He used those crazy 
words correctly.

Additonally the cases where the h in the "h-s" combination really ment the 
latin "esh" (found in phonetic character-sets, - looking like the character 
for Integral). After some time (after invention of the typewriter - there is 
no capital ß?) the ß was replaced by ss. This completely ruined the correct 
pronounciation.

If looking for names like Buss, be aware that, in old German script, it was 
written Booß or in still older records even Bohs.

Comparing the names you search for with those on

http://www.odessa3.org/collections/census/link/geser.txt

in many cases will lead you to the original spelling.

Best whishes,

Reiner