Personal names do go through some changes when moving between
dialects and languages. In my family tree, there is the name "Whittenberg". This
is a corruption of what today would be spelled as "W�rttemberg" and witnesses
the phonological processes you'd get circa 1750-1800 in North Carolina and
eastern Tennessee.
I have no idea how "W�rttemberg" would have been pronounced by
a W�rttemberger (Stuttgart German) in 1750, but it cannot be too far from
present-day Standard German. In particular, I don't know what the combination of
u-umlaut+r+t generates in German (I think the R is 'dropped').
Piotr of course would be much better at explaining it, but
from what I know about phonology and the Southern American accent, it's mostly
an artifact of non-rhoticism and how the u-umlaut+R combination would have been
perceived. To this, there is very obviously some 'contamination' from
'Wittenburg' -- a city and word which would have been quite well known to all
those hardshell Southern US protestants of that time. What does remain
mysterious to me is why it did not come out 'Wootenberg' or 'Wattenberg'
instead, as a Southern accent coping with the original would seem to me to
have likely treated the vowel as an A, instead of shifting to an [ɪ]; I would not be
suprised if I'm wrong in this analysis.
There's another phonological curiosity here too. The first
name "Horace" and "Harris" show up on different documents, and leads to all
sorts of confusion as it sometimes refers to the SAME person. The solution is
found in understanding how this East Tennessee accent transplanted to Tarrent
County, Texas pronounced the name. Neither [hɑɪrɪs] (as in 'hair') nor
[horɪs] (as in
'whore'), but [hɑ:rɪs] (as in (hard'). Either Harris or Horace, then, becomes a satisfactory
eye-spelling. I hope my transcriptions are satisfactory -- the Rs here are
supposed to follows the rules of SouthernAmE non-rhoticism. People -- including
officials filling out official documents -- were very sloppy with their
spellings; the whole documentary trail in this particular branch is littered
with various eye-spellings.
Attempting to make this on-topic to IE studies, well ... it
shows us what happens when one language tackles another's words -- and warns us
about written representations.
Mark.