[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Importance of diacritic letters

[Jerry Frank]

Nelson,

That would be more of a transliteration / pronunciation issue than a diacritic issue.  If you go back to my previous example of L~odz, you could write Vwudge and be sort of close to the right pronunciation.  But no one would have a clue what you meant by writing it that way and certainly no search engine would recognize it.

Just as Itterman could end with [ n ] or [ nn ] in either German or English, I suppose it is possible that someone who converts it to Russian Cyrillic could show it as [ H ], [ HH ] or [ H' ].  These are variants that we have to think about when doing a search.

Another example of a non-diacritic marking is when you see a the surname Hemminger written as Heminger with a line across the top of the [ m ].  This is generally only seen in handwriting, not in typed script.  It is not a diacritic but rather simply a short-cut variation for writing [ mm ].  

Jerry



----- Original Message -----
From: Nelson Itterman <colnels at shaw.ca>
Date: Monday, October 17, 2011 12:40 pm
Subject: RE: [Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Importance of diacritic letters
To: 'Jerry Frank' <FranklySpeaking at shaw.ca>, ger-poland-volhynia at eclipse.sggee.org

> Hello Jerry:
> I understand that in thr Russian Language that there is 
> something following
> the last "n" in my name leaving it Itterman in stead Ittermann.
> Have you heard about it?
> Nelson
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ger-poland-volhynia-bounces at eclipse.sggee.org
> [mailto:ger-poland-volhynia-bounces at eclipse.sggee.org] On Behalf 
> Of Jerry
> Frank
> Sent: October-17-11 11:00 AM
> To: ger-poland-volhynia at eclipse.sggee.org
> Subject: [Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Importance of diacritic letters
> 
> Even seasoned researchers learn new things from time to time.  
> This issue
> came up for me this weekend.
> 
> Diacritic letters are those with a symbol attached to them.  In 
> German this
> would typically be the umlaut.  In Polish there are several 
> including the L
> with a slash through it, some vowels with hooks underneath or a 
> dash above,
> etc.  Here follows what I have learned using the L with a slash 
> as an
> example.
> 
> Some websites are smart enough to interpret L with a slash (I 
> will show it
> further as L~) as a plain L.  So if you search for Lodz (which 
> in Polish is
> actually L~odz) in either the LDS Family Search site or the 
> Pradziad Polish
> Archives site, you will get numerous results.  However, this is not
> consistently true.
> 
> This weekend I was searching for available records for Bl~onie, 
> a town a
> short distance west of Warsaw.  As I had always done, I entered 
> "Blonie" in
> the search box and got few to no results on both sites.  Several 
> of those
> hits were for other locations which I was not interested in.  
> But, when I
> entered "Bl~onie" as the search term, I got hits from both 
> sites.  I now
> know which microfilms to order.
> 
> It is possible to use special keystrokes to achieve diacritic 
> letters but we
> often forget the code for them.  If you use GOOGLE Translator, 
> you will find
> that each language comes up with a little keyboard that holds 
> the special
> characters you need.  Just copy and paste them into the 
> applicable search
> box.  OR, just open any Polish language website and copy and 
> paste your
> special character from there.
> 
> Jerry
> 
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