Re: [cybalist] Deciphering surnames

From: Mark Odegard
Message: 2280
Date: 2000-04-30

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.