Are Wikitreers knowledgeable about German names and their proper spellings?

Question

I see from checking that there are 461 individuals whose German-language given name Friedrich has been misspelled as Freidrich. There is no such name in German. The error probably arises because folk are unaware that in reverse of the case in English, in German ‘ei’ is pronounced ‘eye’ whereas ‘ie’ is pronounced ‘ee’. The name Friedrich is thus correctly pronounced as though it were sounded in English as “Freed-rish”, not something fried. The second syllable represented by ‘rish’ is an approximation as there is no way to represent the sound of German ‘rich’ in English other than approximately.

I began to correct this common spelling error, but the process is both repetitively tedious (even maddening) and time-consuming. Wikitreers, particularly profile managers, should become conversant with this and similar matters and make the necessary adjustments. In instances where a secondary- or tertiary-level source also contains the misspelling, it should be noted and corrected.

As any changes will involve not just name fields, but biographical notes and other parts of an individual’s profile, these sections should reflect the necessary alteration in spelling.

This is but one example of where users need to become aware of the problems involved with given names in German for Anglophones and others not familiar with German orthography and pronunciation.

Please note: while the Rechtsschreibung (Orthographic) reforms in German do not always extend to given names and surnames, they do govern such instances of basic diphthongal orthography.

Comments

I agree that it would be best for all if folks got to know the basics of the phonetics of their ancestors. Perhaps too many people learned their German from Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein.

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Is the name spelled Freidrich on some records and Friedrich on other records for the same person?

The WT guideline is to use the name as given on the earliest record.

Were the Rechtsschreibung (Orthographic) reforms in effect at the time of the records that show the 'wrong' spelling?

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The notion of "correct spelling" -- especially of names -- is entirely modern. While "Freidrich" specifically is pretty rare in historical documents, it is not unheard-of, and other variations (as Sven lists in his answer) occur pretty frequently. The same applies to virtually every name in every language -- and trying to apply any sort of modern rules to German names in particular is likely to end in nothing but frustration. This is because there were German immigrants everywhere in Europe, and the language was used by many people who learned to write in a different language originally. This causes weird spellings like Schvarcz or Veisz or Kakasch, combining orthographies from two (or more) languages.

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ei vs. ie has been around since at least Martin Luther's time. Witness his bible. https://www.taschen.com/en/books/classics/44610/the-luther-bible-of-1534

I understand that "spellings vary" and all that, but this is really a matter of how two different sounds in German have been rendered since before such renderings were being put to press.

Also -- I'm under the impression that we don't just grab whatever spelling first appeared in a person's life, when it was completely out of their control -- if the name was misspelled by a half-literate clerk or assistant to a priest in their birth/baptism, or an almost completely illiterate census taker, we don't just make that the person's name. If the person *changed* the spelling of their name from what **they** used to use to be something else, we make sure both names are recorded as LNAB and current name...

German "ei" for the English sound "eye" and "ie" for for the English sound "ee" is correct. The reverse is just plain incorrect, and has been for a very long time.... and no German people were being called "Fr-eye-drich".

Perhaps it was the dogmatic way the original post was stated that has brought out these contrarian views, but sometimes, there's a right way and a wrong way.. and this is one of those times.

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Thank you, Daphne, for smoothing over my rough edges and making the case for correcting this error, really a kind of pitfall for the unwary, and a howler in terms of German-language usage, in another way.

Dogmatic though it may seem, it is no more dogmatic than, say, expecting folk to pronounce common words the correct way when folk are learning languages or trying to communicate so that they are readily understood. Yes, as you rightly point out, there may be instances in which the illiterate and illogical spelling of Friedrich, i.e. Freidrich,  appears, but to take this as one’s guide as to how to denominate an individual is needlessly obtuse and contrarian. Indeed, if followed, it opens WikiTree to charges of being hopelessly obscurantist, incorrect, and amateur, particularly to German-speakers and those ‘au fait’ with overwhelmingly recognised, well-established, and obvious rules of basic spelling in the context of German.

Sometimes, as you say, a thing is usefully decided, just as WikiTree has all sorts of decided rules about how things must be done so that its core aims can proceed successfully though some might on occasion find these rules, ahem, dogmatic.

I suppose I come across as dogmatic at times as I have spent many thousands of hours dealing with such issues. It doesn’t of course help that I am currently in a hospital bed in traction having to manipulate my iPAD with an ungainly attachment not easily managed in my present parlous condition. My current upswing in WikiTree involvement is due to this enforced stay which I am told is going to be for the foreseeable future. I am in the hands of my medical care team who, while admonishing me not to move, encourage this distraction while I am am on my back for a prolonged period, aided only by a jerry-rigged (those dashed clever Germans again, what!) work-around that gets me through some of the long hours of tedium as my shattered body mends itself slowly.

Sincere regards,

Upton

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M Ross and J Palotay:

You are teaching your grandmother to suck eggs.

If one were to follow these observations of yours, a sort of basic rule of thumb which must be learned by all novices of historical and other research, we would be constantly encountering well-known historical figures whose names were subject to a possibly unrecognisable alteration in appearance due to it. Just because it is a trope of the “a little learning is a dangerous thing” school which points outs out that Shakespeare spelled his surname differently many times, even in the same document, does not mean that we know him by the first or most distorted spelling among possibly myriad spelling examples. Indeed, just as it would be silly and ultimately rather counterproductive to work this way with the interpretation of documentary evidence, so too is it silly to backdate such seemingly open-minded and progressive attitudes toward names without having some basic knowledge of standards and their wider purpose in promoting successful research.

Please note that I am not suggesting that one correct the primary or lesser evidence itself by erasing any perceived misspellings, but rather pointing out some plausible and useful ways of addressing this frequently encountered phenomenon of odd, aberrant, non-standard, and possibly illiterate usage. One can, after all, place one’s thoughts on interpretation in the notes while preserving there too the spelling, however it may appear, one encounters in the original.

Indeed, what my original post tried to point out is that there is every likelihood that the name in question (though it could equally have been another, such as Heinrich, which follows the other half of the rule about this German diphthong) is being misspelled in WikiTree profile names (not just notes or sources) due to a basic lack of knowledge (i.e. common or garden variety ignorance) of German, which, horror of horrors in this laissez-faire age, comes along with some definite spelling conventions which might be called, admittedly on a bad day, dogmatic rules.

Regards from my bed of pain,

Upton

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J Palotay. Thank you for your observations about the difficulties involved in aiming for some level of orthographic standardisation.

A few thoughts on this:

1. Just because effort is involved possibly even involving frustration, this is not uncommon in any worthwhile area of human endeavour.

2. My observations are not seeking perfection, but improvements to make WikiTree more useful by being more standardised at the initial entry level and reserving variants for their proper place, i.e. the place where they can be best addressed, which is the notes.

3. It is unlikely that in any of the 461 instances I noted, Freidrich better reflects the individual concerned’s identity, historical or for present-day research purposes or living descendants, than standard Friedrich. Why? Because the former breaks basic rules of German established over half a millennium ago as another poster pointed out.

4. This brings me to another consideration raised by you. The appearance of people under other guises (mostly spellings since these are what have come down to us) in other languages, dialects, regions, and cultures. These are either for the notes or possibly for multiple listings as separate but linked initial entry points to the database. This is particularly useful and obvious when dealing with widely known historical figures such as St Stephen, the first Christian king of Hungary, whose name appears in Hungarian (naturally enough), but also in English, as well as in possibly all other European languages, and doubtless others as well.

It would be useful the case of many immigrant ancestors to other cultures to list their name(s) in the country and/or culture of origin as well as destination, and possibly also F transit between the two. Consider the case of a German born in Russia whose given name was Vincenz in his mother tongue but found in Russian records as Vikenty when transliterated from the Cyrillic to the Roman alphabet (one of several possible renderings because there are several conventions for transliteration just in English, which vary from from language to language), but written in a passport created for his emigration in both Russian and French as the Russian form and as Vincent, which happens to match the form in English in both America and in the United Kingdom and its offshoots. But our fellow settles in the Bronx and is called Vince by his new neighbours some of whom speak none of the languages mentioned as their first language. This is written down by his Polish neighbour as Winz because that’s how it sounds to him and how he chooses to write it in his mixed knowledge of Polish and English. He keeps the W of Polish which says English ‘v’, and the ‘z’ represented by English ‘ce’, but doesn’t employ a hooked vowel which he might in Polish for a n-sound preceding a consonant, possibly because he recalls that in Polish, St Vincent is familiar Wincenty. Don’t get me started on Magyar as I will probably make a hash of Juhasz which unlike Polish pronounces ‘sz’ as ‘s’ not ‘sh’.

What should be done with entries in other scripts? I looked at the list of new honor [sic] code signatories a day or so ago, and spotting some with what appeared to me to be a Chinese name, generated his or her tree. It was entered almost entirely in Chinese characters. I was none the wiser. Wouldn’t it be delightful to have an automated system that allowed me to view this in Pinyin or Wade-Giles, or some other system of transliteration into the Roman alphabet? Now that would be helpful but would preserve the integrity of the linguistic reality of the people recorded.

With the immigrant Vincenz, Vikenty, Vince, one could employ an option which it might be possible to create: an ability to toggle between languages one could designate for the profile or make optional for all profiles: multiple language name profiles or entries.

With the technology this is possible. Indeed one could allow for the appearance of minority or alternate designations for folk, such as St Bede for Roman Catholics or those wishing to see the Roman Catholic naming designation for someone known to a wider audience by his older and still valid Anglican (and other) form, The Venerable Bede.

WikiTree needs to be culturally sensitive too. The nonsense of H.M. Camilla R. Mountbatten-Windsor KG (etc.) for the profile name of H.M. The Queen Consort is a complete WikiTree neologism and a solecism. It contains a dog’s breakfast of specious naming conventions and American usage. The style H.M. is correct, but then it is wrongly combined with her first Christian name followed by an Americanism, her middle name represented by an initial followed by a full stop. Then the supposed married surname is misrepresented as though Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s 1960 ruling that the name of the Royal Family is Windsor has never occurred and didn’t still obtain (it dies per the Royal Family’s website). Exception are only for members of the Royal House apart from the King and Queen Consort who do not already enjoy the style of H.R.H. and the rank of Prince or Princess of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, or who require a surname for the purposes of a certificate such as a marriage certificate as in the case of Princess Anne (as was) on the occasion of her 1973 marriage to Capt. Mark Phillips. The King wed Mrs Camilla Rosemary Parker Bowles (not Parker-Bowles as her former husband’s and father-in-law’s WikiTree profiles read yesterday when last I checked) as H.R.H. The Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, not as H.R.H. Charles P. A. G. Windsor KG (etc.), much less as Mountbatten-Windsor. Until 1917 the Royal Family had no surname, just a dynastic or house name set off by a preposition, of in English, von (or more conventionally v.) in German. WikiTree makes a hash of this and other culture’s and people’s naming conventions, insensitively and needlessly shoe-horning them into a one-size fits all template, while errantly insisting on a silly rule about names as first instanced in documents. Talk about topsy-turvy priorities.

Regards,

Upton

Answer 1

Like you, I expect the spelling of that name to be Friedrich. However, people make mistakes. Also, many of our ancestors lived before spellings were standardized, so there may have been no fixed idea about how the name was spelled. Further,  we may assume that a person was German, but sometimes it turns out that they are Dutch or Danish or Frisian or something else, and they spelled their name differently from what we expect. For all these reasons, I've learned that it's important to record names as they were spelled in the records (and yes, Freidrich appears sometimes in original records), rather than assuming that we know better. See Help: Name Fields for WikiTree policy on names.

Comments

I agree with Ellen - we should follow the records for each individual first. We can add standardized spellings as alternate names.

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Yes, of course, folk need to know what language context they are dealing with. That said, I defy anyone to cite a conventional spelling in a major Germanic language that does not follow a closely allied rule of orthography.

Answer 2

Note, that older variations in German sources might include spellings such as Friederich, Friderich or Fridrich.

Fritz is a nick name variant.

Also, Fred or Fritz can be found as anglicised versions.

Comments

Yes, but unless one is consulting an old book, one is unlikely to find Friedrich der Grosse (sorry, I cannot type the ess-zet on this machine) or Frederick the Great referenced repeatedly in, say, a biography or historiographical work under these older variants save possibly in notes of sources or in quotations providing examples of former usages or uses.

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Funny side comment: “Der Alte Fritz” is still commonly used to identify Friedrich der Große as a nick name in oral and written German. 

Equally, Friederich is a proper and used first name in German even to this date, see https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friederich while https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friderich is probably less used in modern days, but was used a bit more frequently in the past.

As your original point was around the spelling of Freidrich, I agree it is worth updating those, but other variations exist and should not be discounted because a modern spelling is more frequent than a variant.

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Yes indeed Sven. “Der Alte Fritz” is akin in German to “Der Alte Michel”, which uses a non-standard, older, but still acceptable form of the German Christian or Jewish name, Michael. This said, it is often more useful to use the more commonly recognised form Friedrich even for Friederich in creating profiles and reserving the spelling Friederich for the biography, with an explanation. Of course there are obvious exceptions to this: when a current living person’s name is the lesser used variant, or someone who always used that form actively (various nobles and kings did so).

It is not necessarily useful to employ such less common variants in main headings such as profile names when the usage was what might be termed passive, such as when someone else’s writing, reference, or record is the source of the name, particularly when in all likelihood the party referred to was not necessarily literate or even, when even marginally so (as in cases where folk learned to sign their name only to navigate through life more easily but weren’t actually conventionally literate), likely to been attached to our modern notion of spelling consistency.

Instead, we should consider and concentrate on the main purpose of the Wikitree which is to record people past and present and make some record of their existence accessible, not to obscure that by employing arcane spellings that may crop up in documents on however many occasions. Those, as we agree (“glaub’ ich”), are best left to the notes and footnotes, and, of course, the original records, not the ones we are creating today.

After all, it we didn’t employ normal standardisation rules, we might end up with a database made less useful to folk because it was being made less readily accessible due to the employment of an unnecessary multiplication of spelling variants.

This might make one reflect that a “See list” could be created for names as a help. Thus one might learn that in Westphalian and other dialects, the spelling “Joan” was once often standard in Westphalian regional records for “Johann”, and so on (despite its matching an English-language name for women and girls).

Answer 3

I find orthography-the conventional spelling system of a language plus hyphenation and capitalization- quite fascinating.

What is interesting about German orthography is that the first orthographic conference happened in 1876 and was an attempt to simplify spelling, grammar, pronunciation  and related matters for the then German Empire, its results were rejected.

In the 20th century further attempts were made at a 1901 conference.

In 1902, the results of that conference were approved by the governments of the German Empire, Austria and Switzerland.

In 1944 another reform was planned but did not happen due to WW2.

The latest changes were made in 1996, Place names and family names were excluded from the reform. The new orthography is mandatory only in schools. In 1998 a decision was made that that there is no law on the spelling people use in daily life, so they can use the old or the new spelling.

In relation to the post made above by Upton, I wonder why spellings of names are being changed especially when the names of people on profiles that have been changed or that it is suggested they be changed are almost all for people born and named before 1902.

"Use their conventions instead of ours" is an important part of WikiTree.

We should not be changing spelling of names based on a current day interpretation of how names may or may not have have been pronounced more than 150 years ago.

Comments

Orthography, strictly speaking is not merely the conventional, but from the Greek root meaning, the correct written form of a word (even a name).

Your advice, if followed logically, or, worse, slavishly, to use this supposedly (on the surface of it, at least) useful rule of thumb would likely lead to incredible and unworkable obscurantism and bring the WikiTree project to a halt. We would be constantly superseding ourselves with prior, possibly highly debatable, examples as they came to light. We are not engaged in creating an historical dictionary using the most obscure or most ancient entry points to the subject to come to grips with it. Even the OED leaves such matters for the minutiae, not the main entry. This is what orthography, conventions, and cross references are designed for in the first place.

That said, there is every reason to preserve names and other words in their original spelling, to the extent even possible, in the notes for a person (profile).

Do you seriously believe we should spell William the Conqueror’s name in some rarified example of Norman French or mediaeval ecclesiastical Latin, or even perhaps early Breton or Anglo-Saxon (itself an anachronism of a name), because that is the earliest example we can find of a reference to him? This reasoning calls for a resort to Pope’s dictum about “a foolish consistency”, or Bacon’s on “a little learning”…