[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Name translations

[Günther Böhm]

Richard Benert schrieb:

>But I'm gratified somewhat by Günther's belief that the scribe who 
>"mistakenly" transformed the "e" into "oe" was rendering the name into 
>HOCHdeutsch!
>

Hello Richard,
I didn't realize that it was Richard  *BENERT*  to whom I replied 
because Otto answered at first, cut off your file header and drove the 
matter into a philosophic joke . So my statement was independent of your 
surname and thus even gained some more weight.

But I would like to add one aspect. It is the tendency to assimilate 
names to well known words in order to make them more understandable and 
familiar. So the first one who spelled the name BÖHNERT could really 
have thought of beans. But this has nothing to do with its origin.

How B[a]ER[e]NHART (by the way not from "bear + heart" but from "bear + 
strong, brave" -> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard ) turned to 
BEHNERT is quite simply to comprehend: Originally, the r in it was 
pronounced by vibrating the tip of the tongue against the palate, but as 
this is quite uncomfortable (as a North American you know what I mean) 
it was mostly just suggested by bending the tongue a bit upward. Coming 
from northern Bohemia, traditionally the German speaking region with the 
laziest tongue tip, I also know what I'm speaking of. But a lazily 
pronounced BERNHART sounds like BEHNA[r]T or BÖHNA[r]T.

And here came another assimilation: Since the suffixe -er is very common 
in German surnames that arose from professions or abbrevate the addition 
"-bauer" (peasant), and the final -t is used in North German dialects 
for the plural -s, the spelling was turned from -art to -ert.

You don't like bears? I found you got lots of them in Montana.

Guenther