At 5:42:04 PM on Tuesday, January 11, 2011, Rick McCallister
wrote:
> ***R Speaking of a more notorious hater, I read that
> Hitler's name was derived from Czech Hidlar, Hidlarc^ek
> --what does that mean in Czech? My Slavic friends, who
> speak Polish, Slovenian, Serbian, Ukrainian and Russian
> can't make heads or tails of it
I can't help with the Czech, but
<
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler>, citing Ian
Kershaw's _Hitler 1889-1936_, says that more recent research
prefers other explanations. The most probable is apparently
that the different variants of the name are derivatives of
<Hütte> 'hut, cabin', so that the name signifies a small
farmer or cottager. The article also notes that Jürgen
Udolph thinks that <Hiedler>, the original name of Hitler's
grandfather, derives from dialectal <Hiedl> 'subterranean
stream'.
Brian