[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Name translations
Günther Böhm
GHBoehm at ish.de
Fri Oct 13 03:52:01 PDT 2006
Richard Benert schrieb:
>But I'm gratified somewhat by Günther's belief that the scribe who
>"mistakenly" transformed the "e" into "oe" was rendering the name into
>HOCHdeutsch!
>
Hello Richard,
I didn't realize that it was Richard *BENERT* to whom I replied
because Otto answered at first, cut off your file header and drove the
matter into a philosophic joke . So my statement was independent of your
surname and thus even gained some more weight.
But I would like to add one aspect. It is the tendency to assimilate
names to well known words in order to make them more understandable and
familiar. So the first one who spelled the name BÖHNERT could really
have thought of beans. But this has nothing to do with its origin.
How B[a]ER[e]NHART (by the way not from "bear + heart" but from "bear +
strong, brave" -> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard ) turned to
BEHNERT is quite simply to comprehend: Originally, the r in it was
pronounced by vibrating the tip of the tongue against the palate, but as
this is quite uncomfortable (as a North American you know what I mean)
it was mostly just suggested by bending the tongue a bit upward. Coming
from northern Bohemia, traditionally the German speaking region with the
laziest tongue tip, I also know what I'm speaking of. But a lazily
pronounced BERNHART sounds like BEHNA[r]T or BÖHNA[r]T.
And here came another assimilation: Since the suffixe -er is very common
in German surnames that arose from professions or abbrevate the addition
"-bauer" (peasant), and the final -t is used in North German dialects
for the plural -s, the spelling was turned from -art to -ert.
You don't like bears? I found you got lots of them in Montana.
Guenther
More information about the Ger-Poland-Volhynia
mailing list