Illegal immigrant

On April 2, the Associated Press’s Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll wrote that

[the AP] Stylebook no longer sanctions the term “illegal immigrant” or the use of “illegal” to describe a person. Instead, it tells users that “illegal” should describe only an action, such as living in or immigrating to a country illegally.

Is this supposed to be a pronouncement on English syntax? That is, an adjective describing an action should not modify the person committing that action?

There is a certain logic to that judgment. But then what about, say bad writer? Someone who writes badly can be a perfectly good person. An abstract artist may produce abstract art, but it usually a concrete person. A criminal lawyer may practice criminal law, but is most probably a law-abiding citizen. I wonder if the AP will, for the sake of consistency, drop these usages.

Probably not.

Organizations

I just read, in the latest New Yorker, Jill Lepore’s remarkable article (“The Force”) about the history of American military spending. And a few days ago I heard, on NPR’s Fresh Air, the rebroadcast of an interview with Cullen Murphy, the author of a book (God’s Jury) about the Catholic Inquisition. And I was struck by a certain resemblance. Both the US military (or, more generally, the security apparatus including the military and “intelligence”) and the Inquisition (or, for that matter, the Catholic Church itself) are typical human organizations in that, whatever their intended function may be, once such an organization becomes established its primary function becomes its own preservation and growth (in power if not in numbers).

This happens even the intended purpose becomes moot for one reason or another. The March of Dimes, founded by Franklin D. Roosevelt in order to combat polio, did not disband after polio was essentially eliminated but simply changed its mission. And the function of the Lance Armstrong Foundation, whatever its nominal mission (“to improve the lives of people affected by cancer”), was to promote the image of its founder as a philanthropic hero. With that image in shatters, the foundation will just try to live on (as the Livestrong Foundation) and be strong. Live strong, indeed: this could be the motto of most organizations.

 

Obama’s white men

I had thought that the media buzz had died down over the fact that the first four persons to be nominated by Obama for major government positions were all white men. But Stephen Colbert brought it up just the other night, so I though that I might as well add my little buzz to it.

I have two personal issues with the story.

One of them is my disappointment over the fact that none of the four is going to replace a black man. I don’t mean just any black man, but one in particular, and I wouldn’t really care if he were replaced by a white man or a purple hermaphrodite. I am referring to the abominable Eric Holder, the Attorney General of the United States, who has done (I don’t know if through malice or incompetence, nor whether on his own initiative or at the President’s behest) to pervert the administration of justice in this country than anyone else I can think of. Examples: the disproportionate prosecution of Aaron Swartz which led to his suicide; the dropped investigation of Lance Armstrong despite a mountain of evidence worthy of a polka-dot jersey; the heavy-handed attacks on legal marijuana clubs in California, Obama’s campaign promises to the contrary notwithstanding; Operation Fast and Furious; and the abject failure to prosecute the financial finaglers whose fraudulent flimflam has caused so much grief. It seems to me that the word “justice” had no meaning in Holder’s vocabulary other than the name of the department that he heads.

My other issue is even more personal. The listing of Jacob Lew (the nominee for Secretary of the Treasury) as a “white man” makes me queasy. Lew is, by descent, a Polish Jew like me, and for us actual Polish Jews whiteness as a marker of race is meaningless. We were marked for extermination by Hitler as Jews by race. I am still amazed when I read, in books dealing with the “Holocaust”, references to the religious practices (or non-practices) of the victims. They are irrelevant. Hitler’s anti-Semitism was racial, not religious, and if a Lutheran bishop met the Nuremberg criteria as a Jew, he would be persecuted like any other.

Personally, I experienced being white just once in my life. It was on my first day in America, in 1950, when I boarded (with my mother) a streetcar in New Orleans and went to the back in search of an empty seat, only to be told by the conductor that I was not allowed to sit there – it was the place for colored people. In the 1950s it was not at all uncommon for Jews to experience various kinds of discrimination in the United States, nor was it a coincidence that Jews were so prominent in the civil rights movement at the time (and earlier, going back to the Spingarns and the Leo Frank lynching). While I do not support Noel Ignatiev‘s theories of whiteness, or critical race theory, I feel that characterizing an American Jew as simply a “white man” is a historical inaccuracy.

Goodbye, Two-Buck Chuck

As of today, January 16, Two-Buck Chuck is no more. Charles Shaw wines sold at Trader Joe’s in California now cost $2.49 a bottle, not $1.99. In other words, Two-Buck has been replaced by his twin Two-and-a-Half-Buck.

The fact that the price remained at $1.99 for over a decade – one of the great bargains in the history of wine and drink – is quite astounding in itself. But then, a price increase of 25% makes up in one fell swoop for the inflation that averaged 2.5% over the past decade. It’s still a bargain, but Two-and-a-Half-Buck Chuck is more of a mouthful than the old name, and I think that the affectionate name will pass out of folklore.

Annals of anglicization

For some reason, I have always been fascinated by the subject of topographic exonyms, that is, the names by which places are known in languages other than the local ones. Perhaps it’s because, in my multilingual upbringing, I had to learn what places were called in the various languages around me. Or perhaps not.

About year ago I wrote a post proposing that the city that until the 1920s was known in English  as Lemberg should continue to be  so called, rather than by the hard-to-pronounce Slavic alternatives Lwów, L’vov or L’viv. And a number of years ago (in 2007) I wrote one surveying the pattern of English names of cities in Europe, and finding that, except in northern Europe (approximately north of the 52nd parallel), historically important cities are often known by names derived from French, from Bruges to Belgrade, from Lisbon to Prague, from Seville to Athens.

I want to explore two aspects of this nomenclature, one having to do with the form of the name and the other with the shift over the years from French-based to native names, specifically in German-speaking territory.

The formal aspect I want to look at has to do with names that, in French, have a “silent” e in the final syllable. In most cases this e is retained in English: Seville, Rome, Naples, Florence, Belgrade, Prague. In a few cases it is dropped: Lisbonne → Lisbon, Ratisbonne → Ratisbon, Athenes → Athens, Brusselles → Brussels. Note, in the last two examples, that I am using the older French spellings (Middle French) from which the English forms are derived: no accent marks, and no replacement of ss by x (which is due to a misreading of a Medieval scribal symbol). Such dropping is consistent with what also happened with many common nouns: charte → chart, masse → mass, and so on.

And in a few other cases the final -e became -a. The most obvious examples of this are Geneva, Saragossa and Vienna; but it may well be that such names as Barcelona and Padua are derived from French Barcelone and Padoue by this process. Now, I am not aware of any common nouns that got changed like this, but several French princesses named Mathilde, Isabelle or Henriette Marie turned, on becoming queens of England (or Great Britain), into  Mat(h)ilda, Isabella or Henrietta Maria. I am not sure why this happened, but the process may have been the same as the one operating on place-names.

Now, the number of French-derived names of German cities was once much larger than today. Nowadays, in Germany proper, only Cologne, Munich and Nuremberg are still used, perhaps because the German names all have umlauts and, in the days before computer typing, inserting umlauts was too much trouble. There is also, of course, Vienna, which is too well-known to undergo a name change, and, in Switzerland, Berne and Lucerne. (Strasbourg, while historically German, is actually French; Fribourg is primarily French; and Luxembourg is officially French.)

With the help of the Google Ngram Viewer, it’s possible to follow the evolution of the retreat of the French names of other cities in favor of the German ones. We find, for example, that Leipzig began to surpass Leipsic around 1865, perhaps because, the city being a major commercial and educational center, communication by telegraph was simpler if there was no ambiguity about spelling. Basel becomes commoner than Basle (the old French spelling, modern Bâle) around 1897, possibly because the first Zionist Congress, which was held there in 1896, had German (the language of its organizer, Theodor Herzl) as its working language, and the English-language reporters who covered it were more attuned to German than to French. Mainz passes Mayence in 1900, and Speyer passes Spires (French Spire, but the English addition of -s to French names is also evidenced in Lyons and Marseilles) in 1908. But Ratisbon does not beat Regensburg until 1935, Aix-la-Chapelle passes Aachen in 1940, and Frankfort (French Francfort) doesn’t seem to yield to Frankfurt until the end of World War II, 1945. It may be that Frankfort, Kentucky, added to the popularity of that name; when I set Frankfurt am Main against Frankfort on the Main the former passes the latter in 1925.

It might be interesting to check these results against the New York Times Article Archive, which goes back to 1851 and therefore covers the whole period during which these changes took place. But that’s a task for another day.

Upton Something

No, I don’t mean Upton Sinclair, but I’m sorry, I just haven’t been able to come up with a pithy two-word phrase that would encapsulate the opposite or counterpart of Downton Abbey. But it so happens that I watched the first episode of Series 3 (“Season 3″ in the US) just as I was finishing Ruth Rendell’s latest novel, The St. Zita Society, and I couldn’t help thinking of it as just such a counterpart.

Julian Fellowes, the creator of Downton Abbey, and Ruth Rendell are both life peers and hence members of the House of Lords. He is Baron Fellowes of West Stafford, Conservative, and she is Baroness Rendell of Babergh, Labour. Though they are of different generations, they surely know each other. But Fellowes belongs to the literary/show business set that Rendell so often mocks. And he seems to admire nobility: both the hereditary nobility of titles (he was upset that his wife, the niece of a childless earl, could not succeed to the title) and the nobility of spirit that one finds among the loyal servants of the titled. In Downton Abbey scoundrels are few, and they are mostly outside these two sets, like the upstart press lord Sir Richard Carlisle and Bates’s wife Vera. And of the mostly noble rest of the characters, some are excruciatingly so, like Matthew Crawley and Anna Smith-Bates.

The St. Zita Society is also about rich people (titled and not) and their servants, but nobility is not to be found among them. With a few exceptions (all of whom belong to ethnic minorities) they are all mean, or stupid, or both; or else insane. I don’t know any writer who can get into the mind of a mentally disturbed person, and get their thoughts and actions to follow logically from their state of mind, better than Ruth Rendell. Here, as elsewhere, the one crazy person plays a crucial part.

It isn’t that Ruth Rendell does not recognize human decency. In the Inspector Wexford series, the inspector and his family and associates are mainly intelligent, sensitive persons. And in the novels written under the name Barbara Vine, which are invariably in the first person, the narrator is always such a person as well. But as for the world around them, look out!

One thing that made me feel that Ruth Rendell’s book is perhaps an intentional antidote to Downton Abbey is a plot element common to both: a lord’s daughter marrying his chauffeur. But the circumstances are as different as the eras (almost a century apart) and as the two authors.

Joy in Sabadell

I may be one of the last denizens of Planet Internet to find out about the viral video known as Som Sabadell flashmob, which was posted last May by the big Spanish bank called Banco (de) Sabadell. It shows a seemingly spontaneous gathering of orchestral musicians, starting with a double-bass player in white tie and tails. He is soon joined by other, more casually dressed musicians and eventually choristers, performing an abbreviated version of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy (from his 9th Symphony) in the busy main square (Plaça Sant Roc) of Sabadell, the city (north-northwest of Barcelona) where the bank is headquartered. In fact, the bank’s original building (with the lettering BANC DE SABADELL clearly visible) appears as a backdrop for the performance, along with the city hall and the church of Saint Felix.

It appears that crowd joins in the singing of the Ode, though it’s fairly clear that the soundtrack was professionally recorded and added to the video. Anyway, what they sing is the first three quatrains, in a Catalan translation by the poet Joan Maragall (grandfather of Pasqual Maragall, former President of Catalonia); translating German poetry was a specialty of his. From my point of view as an experienced song translator, it is a superb translation: it maintains the rhyme scheme and meter, as well as the essential meaning, of the original. The only objection might be that the language is the literary Catalan of over a century ago (Maragall died in 1911), quite different from the present-day language. For example, the word joia (joy) is old-fashioned; the modern word would be alegria.

For those who want to sing along with the video, I am enclosing Maragall’s verses, along with a phrase-by-phrase English translation, below. I have marked up the Catalan text as a pronunciation guide, which I explain further down.

Joia, qu(e) ets dels déus guspira Generada dal(t) del cel: Ven(t) de foc el pit respira Sota (e)ls plecs del teu san(t) vel. Si ajuntar-se’ls cors demanen Que un mal ven(t) va separan(t), Tots els homes s’agermanen On tes ales van tocan(t). Si fortuna generosa Ens (h)a dat un bon company Oh companya graciosa, Cantarem am(b) més afany.

Joy, spark of the gods, Engendered above heaven: The breast breathes wind of fire Under the folds of your holy veil. If hearts ask to be joined, Those that an ill wind separates, All men become brothers Where your wings touch. If generous fortune Has given us a good companion, Oh gracious companion, We will sing with more zeal.

 

Stressed vowels (marked bold) are as in Italian. In particular, e and o can be either open or closed. The open values are as in pet and pot as pronounced in most of Britain (not North America). The closed values (marked bold italic) are as in mate and mote as pronounced in Scotland, Ireland or the West Indies, not diphthongs as in North America or most of England.

As regards unstressed vowels (unmarked), a (at least in the Barcelona region, as heard in the recording), i and u are essentially the same as stressed. Unstressed e and o are the same as a and u, respectively. In this text there are four instances of the latter (tocant, fortuna, company, companya); in each case the o is read as though written u (like the vowel of push). There are almost two dozen unstressed e‘s, all to be pronounced as though written a, that is, like the vowel of cut as spoken in North America or southern England.

Consonants: c, g, j and s are as in French; b, v, and r are as in Spanish;  l is as in English; and ny is like Spanish ñ. Silent letters are in parentheses.

Sing with joy!

Reflection

On reviewing my latest post I noticed two things that had not occurred to me as I was writing it.

One was that whenever I did not refer to Elizabeth George by her full lname (or, at least, her author name) I called her Ms. George. On the other hand, when I wrote about Ian Rankin, I called him Rankin. I evidently have not yet absorbed the by-now-not-so-new convention of referring to women simply by their surnames. It is, of course, a journalistic convention, not a novelistic one: George herself (there, I did it!) refers to Thomas Lynley as Lynley, but to Barbara Havers as Barbara. And its common use in journalism (outside the New York Times, which maintains Mr. and Ms.) can be confusing, as when in an article about Hillary Clinton, in which there may be references to her husband, she is called simply Clinton.

I also wrote that Elizabeth George “showed herself as being even more like a British writer in another respect: clumsiness in writing about non-anglophone culture,” letting it go at that, without citing examples. An example came my way the next day, as I was reading Ruth Rendell’s The Vault. Here a key element of the plot is the use of the French word punaise as a mnemonic for a person’s PIN, since punaise supposedly means ‘pin.’ But the primary meaning (that is, the first meaning that will come to a French person’s mind) of punaise is ‘bug’ (specifically ‘bedbug’); a secondary meaning is ‘pin’ of the kind that in Britain is known as drawing pin, in America thumbtack, but the general word for ‘pin’ is épingle. And just before this book I had read Rendell’s Portobello, one of whose characters has a mother who is a Muslim from Assam and whose language is not Assamese or Bengali or Sylheti but Hindi, a language practically unknown in Assam (see Wikipedia).

Even supposedly cosmopolitan, world-traveling British writers, like E. M. Forster, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham or John le Carré, often betray in their writings the likelihood that they spend most of their time abroad chatting with other Brits. Le Carré, for example, worked as a diplomat in Germany, and yet his knowledge of German language and culture shows considerable lapses. And George Orwell, who wrote Homage to Catalonia, didn’t know Catalan.

American writers, by and large, have not exhibited these symptoms. Hispanic culture, for example, has been portrayed by some of our greatest writers, from Washington Irving and Helen Hunt Jackson to Hemingway, Steinbeck, Thornton Wilder and Katherine Anne Porter, and in reading their works one feels that their knowledge of the culture, or at least the subcultures they wrote about, is thorough.

An exception comes to mind in Tony Hillerman’s The Sinister Pig, where the digressions on Spanish and Latin American culture and history are a sorry mess, surprising from someone who spent most of his life in the half-Hispanic city of Albuquerque, and enough to almost (but not quite) make me doubt the authenticity of his Navajo lore.

Elizabeth George spent most of her life in California, another place with a large Hispanic population, so I would expect her (meticulous researcher that she is, to gather from her forewords and afterwords) to know better. My guess is that she deliberately botched the Spanish in order to seem more British.

Spanish, by George

Last year I published a post, titled English, by George, about some lapses in Elizabeth George’s otherwise highly successful endeavor (endeavour, as she would put it) to write her set-in-Britain Inspector Lynley mysteries as if she were herself English. Those lapses, some of which I listed in the cited post, I can only call Americanisms.

I have just finished Elizabeth George’s last Lynley novel, Believing the Lie, and I can report that, in a fast but not sloppy reading of its 600+ pages, not one such Americanism jumped out at me. Instead, she showed herself as being even more like a British writer in another respect: clumsiness in writing about non-anglophone culture.

Ms. George seems to have fine a fine ear for the varieties of language spoken by indigenous English folk of different classes and regions. Her occasional Scottish characters, on the other had, speak a kind of stereotypical Scots that one rarely hears in Scotland. (She makes other mistakes about Scotland, for example supposing — in This Body of Death — that a crime committed in the Highlands would be investigated by the Glasgow-based Strathclyde Police rather than the Northern Constabulary.) For her West Indian characters she writes a kind of eye dialect that doesn’t really reflect an accent, only that it’s somehow different.

In the new novel, one of the dozen or so central characters (yes!) is an Argentinean woman named Alatea Vasquez y del Torres. It’s the kind of name one would expect in a second-rate comedy skit making fun of Spanish names, not in a serious novel.

Let me discuss the various parts of the name. To begin with, Del Torres is grammatically impossible as a Spanish name, since the contraction del is singular masculine, while Torres is plural feminine. De la Torre is a standard Spanish surname, as is simply Torres, and De las Torres is possible, but not what Ms. George chose. (Note: the initial d is capitalized when the name stands by itself, but not when it immediately follows another part of the full name.) A Web search for Del Torres turns up Americans with Del and Torres as first and last names, respectively, and a supposed place in Costa Rica called Bajos del Torres which, on further inspection, turns out to be Bajos de Torres (a neighborhood in the Uruca District of San José). And, of course there are also tracts in Florida with Del Torres as part of the name, just like Seinfeld‘s Del Boca Vista.

Now, the conjunction y (‘and’) was once commonly used between the first (paternal) and the second (maternal) surname in Spanish, but is now largely obsolete; for example, the son of the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset went by José Ortega Spottorno. The y is sometimes inserted when it helps to avoid confusion, as, for example, when the first surname has the same form as a possible forename. Thus, if the famous physiologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal had not used y, he might have been taken for someone with Santiago Ramón as his given names; similarly for Vicente Enrique y Tarancón, José María Gabriel y Galán, and others.

But, most importantly, most Hispanics don’t present themselves with their double surnames outside of official circumstances, and Argentineans least of all, perhaps because a great many of them are of non-Spanish descent. I have known a good many Argentineans in person, and many more by reputation. and only one person I knew used the double name: his name was Carlos García, and his desire to be distinguished from the thousands of other Carlos Garcías was understandable. If you look at Wikipedia’s long list of famous Argentineans, you will find that a bare handful have two surnames listed, and only one of them (Vicente López y Planes, 1785–1856) used y.

There is another factor to consider: there is a certain mystery about the character named Alatea Vasquez y del Torres, and I have to say, without revealing too much of the plot, that a change of identity is involved. It seems very unlikely that such a character, on leaving Latin America, would keep the full official Spanish version of her name, even if she had used it before, which is also unlikely. Of course the fact that she did so makes it possible for Barbara Havers (with Winston Nkata’s help) to trace Alatea’s background on the Internet, with the result that her parents are found to be Esteban Vega y de Vasquez and Dominga Padilla y del Torres de Vasquez. If those (with some corrections) were in fact the parents’ names, then Alatea would be Vega Padilla, not Vasquez y del Torres, and her mother’s name would end in de Vega, not de Vasquez. (Argentineans have clung, more than others, to the tradition of appending a man’s paternal surname, preceded by de, to his wife’s name; witness Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.)

As I said, all this would be fine in a comedy skit. As would be the name of Alatea’s hometown, Santa Maria de la Cruz, de los Angeles, y de los Santos. (Never mind that Spanish doesn’t use the serial comma, except to prevent ambiguity.) But not in a would-be realistic novel.

And then there is the matter of Alatea’s English. While we are told at the outset that she has a strong accent, and on at least one occasion that she can’t come up with the English word for something (though we are not told what the Spanish word might be), there is no indication of any Spanish influence in either the direct dialogue in which she participates, or in her thoughts as given in indirect speech. No eye dialect, no how do you say it in English, no grammatical lapses. The detectives’ attempts to contact her family show that no one in Santa Maria etc. speaks English, and Alatea seems to have had no higher eductaion, with her sojourn in anglophone territory (first Utah, then England) being relatively brief. So how, then, did she acquire the impeccable English of Elizabeth George’s upper-class characters?

It’s an added mystery, with no solution provided.

Kröger, Kroger, Kroeger

It must be some four decades since I saw François Truffaut’s film The Bride Wore Black (1968), but there is a trivial detail that remains in my memory: the fact that, while the action takes place in France and the characters are French, they have mostly English-looking names such as Corey, Fergus and Bliss. The reason is that the movie is based on a novel by the American writer Cornell Woolrich, and Truffaut, for some idiosyncratic reason, decided to keep the original names in spite of transplanting the action into France. He did not do the same with another Woolrich adaptation, Mississippi Mermaid (based on Waltz into Darkness), even though the novel’s main character already has a French name, Louis Durand – in the film he is Louis Mahé.

The detail from The Bride Wore Black came to mind when I recently saw another French Film, Queen to Play (2009) by Caroline Bottaro. (The French title is Joueuse, meaning ‘player,’ but the English translation misses the all-important feminine gender of the original.) It is about an uneducated working woman (played by Sandrine Bonnaire) in Corsica who is taught to play chess by a mysterious stranger (played by Kevin Kline), an American known as Dr. Kröger. And it’s the incongruity between name and nationality that brought back the Truffaut detail.

Americans, for one thing, are not normally called ‘doctor’ in their private lives unless they are practicing physicians, dentists or, possibly, pastors, and the Kevin Kline character gives no indication of being any of these; he just seems to be some sort of scholar. (I am a Ph.D. in Engineering Science, but it would never occur to me to present myself as Dr. Lubliner, nor would it, I daresay, to my professional colleagues.)

And Kröger is, of course, a distinctly German name. There are a great any Americans with surnames of German origin, but an American whose surname was originally Kröger would, in all likelihood, be Kroger or Kroeger.

When I checked the film’s credits, I noticed that was based on a novel by a writer with the clearly German name Bertina Henrichs. Aha! I said to myself. He was German in the original, and Mme. Bottaro kept the name!

No such luck. It turns out that while Bertina Henrichs is indeed German, she lives in France and wrote the book in French. Moreover, the action takes place on the Greek island of Naxos, and all the characters are Greek, including the man who teaches the heroine to play chess – an old high-school teacher of hers, named Kouros.

Transplanting the action from one Mediterranean island to another, specifically one where people speak French (very few Corsicans under 70 or so still speak Corsican), is an obvious choice for a French filmmaker. And changing the teacher in to a stranger who seems closer to the woman in age than an old high-school teacher would have been gives their relationship a sexual tension it wouldn’t otherwise have. But why an American with an über-German name?

On further investigation it turns out that Caroline Bottaro is also German by birth. Perhaps she had a high-school teacher named Dr. Kröger (in Germany it’s quite common for Gymnasium teachers to be called Dr. So-and-so). And perhaps she had meant the character to be German, but couldn’t pass up the opportunity of casting a star like Kevin Kline. And since the script was already written, she didn’t feel like revising it with respect to a detail that only a stickler like me would care about.

Anyway, back to a point I already made: names of German origin are extremely common in the United States, but if they have an umlaut in the original form, it is not kept. Immigrants with umlauted surnames generally took one of three options.

The most radical option was to anglicize the name, either by replacing it with a cognate English name (so that König became King, Grün became Green), or by respelling it so that it looked English: Schäfer → Shafer, Schröder → Shrader, Kühner → Keener. Of course, this option is not limited to names with umlauts, and so many a Schmidt became Smith, Koch became Cook, as well as Klein → Kline or Cline, Bach → Baugh, Hauser → Houser or Howser, Obermeyer → Overmire, Pfeiffer → Phifer, Sieferle → Siverly (my wife’s surname). Some names were only partly anglicized, most notably Steinway (from Steinweg) and Eisenhower (from Eisenhauer).

The second option was simply to drop the umlaut. That’s how we get people named Schafer, Hofstadter, Schroder, Muller, Buhler. The droppers’ names, like the anglicizers’, are expected to be pronounced according to such rules as English might have, which means that with a name like Moller (originally Möller) it isn’t obvious whether it should rhyme with ‘holler’ or with ‘roller.’ But such uncertainty is not limited to names with dropped umlauts. My name can be read in at least four ways, and there are just as many ways of avoiding the ‘cock’ pronunciation of Koch, while announcers for the 2004 Summer Olympics had to distinguish between Mia Hamm (‘ham’) and Paul Hamm (‘hahm’). Nor is it, of course, limited to German names. Even British names have not always kept their sound on crossing the Pond.

The third option, the most conservative one, is to replace the umlaut with an added e – an option that exists in German as well (for example Goethe) – leading to Schaefer, Boehner, Goetz, Weyerhaeuser, Mueller. This option is most problematic with regard to pronunciation. For ae there is a tradition, probably derived from the use of this digraph in Scots, of treating it like a “long a” (though not in Latin words). Thus if someone is descended from an immigrant named Dätz (pronounced in German like ‘dets’) who was a dropper and is therefore named Datz, the name will sound like ‘dats,’ but if the immigrant ancestor was an e-adder so that  name is spelled Daetz it will probably be read like ‘dates’; aeu (originally äu, sounding like ‘oy’) is usually treated the same as au and pronounced ‘ow’. For oe there is no rule at all – witness ‘shoe,’ ‘goes,’ ‘does’ (verb), ‘coed,’ ‘subpoena,’ not to mention ‘foehn‘ and ‘loess’ (originally Föhn and Löss) – and ue is ambivalent as well (‘sues,’ ‘suet’). And so people named Goetz may be variously known as gets, goats or gates, while Mueller may be muller, mewler or miller.

With the advent of computer printing, diacritics are no longer a problem, and Hispanic Americans, in particular, have made a point of reclaiming them. In California there are, at present, politicians named Hernández, Pérez, Núñez and Gascón. But Americans with a German background have by now been almost been completely absorbed into the Anglo-American population – my wife, for example, did not know about the German origin of her name – and I don’t expect anyone named Dr. Kröger to be ever taken for an American. Except, perhaps, in a French movie.