Lürmann into Lurman, Schön into Schon, Suplée into Suplee or Supplee, Luders into Luders and Bruhl into Brill. Even when no accent betrays it, the foreign diphthong is under hard pressure. Thus the German oe disappears, and Loeb is changed to Lobe or Laib, Oehler to Ohler, Loeser to Leser, and Schoen to Schon or Shane. In the same way the aw in such names as Rosenau changes to aw. So too, the French oi-sound is dis- posed of, and Dubois is pronounced Doo-boys, and Boileau ac- quires a first syllable rhyming with toil. So with the kn in the German names of the Knapp class; they are all pronounced, probably by analogy with Knight, as if they began with n. So with sch; Schneider becomes Snyder, Schlegel becomes Slagel, and Schluter becomes Sluter. If_a foreigner clings to/ the orig- inal spelling of his name he must usually expect to hear it mis- pronounced. Roth, in American, quickly becomes Rawth; Fre- mont, losing both accent and the French e, become Freemont; Blum begins to rhyme with dumb; Mann rhymes with van, and Lang with hang; Krantz, Lantz and their cognates with chance; Kurtz with shirts; the first syllable of Gutmann with but; the first of Kahler with bay; the first of Werner with turn; the first of Wagner with nag. Uhler, in America, is always Touler. Berg loses its German e-sound for an English w-sound, and its German hard g for an English g; it becomes identical with the berg of iceberg. The same change in the vowel occurs in Erd- mann. In Konig the German diphthong succumbs to a long o, and the hard g becomes k; the common pronunciation is Cone-ik. Often, in Berger, the g becomes soft, and the name rhymes with verger. It becomes soft, too, in Bittinger. In Wilstach and Welsbach the ch becomes a k. In Anheuser the eu changes to a long i. The final e, important in German, is nearly always silenced; Dohme rhymes with foam; Kuhne be- comes Keen.
In addition to these transliterations, there are constant trans- lations of foreign proper names. "Many a Pennsylvania Car- penter," says Dr. Oliphant, [1] "bearing a surname that is Eng- lish, from the French, from the Latin, and there a Celtic loan- 17 Baltimore Sun, March 17, 1907.
- ↑ 17
