American Language Supplement 2

by H. L. Mencken

  9 Wedding notice, New York Times, Feb. 25, 1946.

  10 Death notice, same, April 21, 1946.

  11 Baltimore Sun, Sept. 8, 1944: “As a rule Army captains do not greet Navy lieutenants with a kiss, but that is what happened in Brisbane recently when two Baltimore brothers, Lieut. Jonas H. Cohen and Capt. Norman Coliver, met for the first time in 27 months.”

  12 Noted in New York by a correspondent who chooses to remain anonymous.

  13 Death notice, New York Times, April 22, 1946.

  14 Same, Baltimore Sun, July 11, 1945.

  1 Announcement of engagement, New York Times, Jan. 24, 1946.

  2 Wedding notice, Brooklyn Eagle, April 18, 1946; notice of engagement, New York Herald Tribune, June 28, 1946.

  3 The case of the orchestra conductor, Bruno Walter, recorded in his autobiography, Theme and Variations; New York, 1946, p. 89. The change was made before he immigrated to America.

  4 Death notice, New York Times, Jan. 26, 1946. Snedeker or Snediker is a Dutch name.

  5 Wedding notice, same, Feb. 1, 1946.

  6 Death notice, same, Feb. 1, 1946.

  7 Both found in the Harvard quinquennial catalogue by Miles L. Hanley and reported in American Speech, Oct., 1933, p. 78.

  8 Court Circular, London Times, Sept. 20, 1945.

  9 The author of The Adding Machine, Street Scene and other popular plays. See Current Biography: Who’s News and Why; New York, 1943, p. 617.

  10 I am indebted for many of these specimens to Mr. Alexander Kadison, of New York, a diligent collector of onomastic Americana. “It is claimed,” says Dr. A. A. Roback in Sarah to Sylvia to Shirley, Commentary, Sept., 1946, p. 274, “that a characteristically Jewish name is a drawback in the matter of a career. What is meant, of course, is that it is a drawback to be known unmistakably and immediately for a Jew.… [But] the fact probably is that when a Jew appropriates a fancy Anglo-Saxon or Scotch name like Gainsborough or Stewart the Anglo-Saxons and Scotch dislike him all the more for it.”

  11 Seeks to Change Surname, Baltimore Sun, Nov. 3, 1927.

  12 Obituary in New York Herald Tribune, April 17, 1947.

  13 Discards Pulitzer Name, New York Times, Feb. 27, 1947.

  14 The last two are from The How and Why of Name-Changing, by Helen P. Wulbern, before cited.

  15 Samuel H. Abramson shows in Abramson Blames the Goldbergs, Canadian Jewish Chronicle, March 20, 1942, that it also leads in Canada, where it is followed by Greenberg, Freedman, or Friedman, Katz, Levy, Goldberg, Rosenberg, Bernstein and Abramson in order.

  16 Cohan(e) and Coen are Irish names. Woulfe, in his Irish Names and Surnames, says that the former was originally O Cathain or O Ceochain and the latter O Comhdain, O Comhghain or Mac Eoghain.

  17 Many other Cohens have changed their surnames to unrelated forms, e.g., Crane and Quinn.

  1 Here I am indebted to Dr. Solomon Solis Cohen, of Philadelphia; private communication, May 7, 1937. William B. Ziff says in The Rape of Palestine; New York, 1938, p. 189, that many of the Jews now resettled in Palestine have gone back to Hebrew names. Mr. Gershon Aronsky, editor of the Palestine Post (Jerusalem) supplies me with some examples taken from public notices of name changes in the Palestine Gazette, 1946. They include Steinberg to Harsela, Perlmutter to Dar, Moscovitz to Doron, Wasserman to Tavor, Braun to Bar-On, Gutman to Bar-Tov, Hoffman to Ben Yaaqov, Lederman to Yeredor, Loewenstein to Zzr-Ayre, Fischer to Ben-Nun, Aronsheim to Beit Aharon, Rosenfelder to Vared, Miller to Sinay, Niedermann to Nasi, Bernstein to Ben-Horin, Bergenbaum to Oren, Weinstein to Hagiti, and Dudelzak to Halili.

  2 Mr. B. G. Kayfetz, of Toronto, tells me that many of these are not American inventions, but are encountered among Jews all over Europe. The forms with German or Slavic suffixes, e.g., -thai, -sky, -sohn and -stein, were all imported.

  3 Lee is also a favorite with other immigrant groups, and that fact may account in part for its high frequency among American surnames − 156 in every 100,000 of population, which is much higher than its frequency in England. It is adopted in place of difficult German names, e.g., Liebknecht and Lietsche; common Jewish names other than Levy, e.g., Leon, and the Chinese Li and Scandinavian Lie. In New York the German-Jewish name Lehman(n) is fast acquiring the pronunciation of Lee-man (AL4, p. 500, n. 1); in time it may become simple Lee. Already it is common to find Lees with Jewish given-names.

  1 Abrahamson Blames the Goldbergs, by Samuel H. Abramson, before cited.

  2 Dr. Pepys’ Diary, Journal of the American Medical Association, Oct. 7, 1944.

  3 This appeared in a news story in the Baltimore Sun, last page, April 20, 1937.

  4 Tonics and Sedatives, Journal of the American Medical Association, Dec. 16, 1939.

  5 This was the form used by the defendant in a smuggling case in New York in 1938.

  6 Engagement notice, New York Times, Aug. 30, 1946. Johannes Hoops, in Shakespeare’s Name and Origin, Studies for William A. Read; University (La.), 1940, p. 70, lists Chacsper as one of the early variants of Shakespeare.

  7 Billboard, Dec. 29, 1934, p. 99. The French form is Gougenheim.

  8 A death notice in the New York Times, Feb. 23, 1946, recorded the change of Rosebush to DesRosiers, but Rosebush may not have been a Jewish name.

  9 The Sephardic Jews, who are relatively few in number, usually stick to their original names, e.g., the Spanish Acosta, the Portuguese de Silva and the French de Casseres. I am indebted here to Dr. L. L. Barrett, of the University of North Carolina.

  1 In the NBC Handbook of Pronunciation, compiled by James F. Bender; New York, 1944, p. 119, both lne-stine and the German form lne-shtine are given.

  2 But I have heard even Gorfine turned into Gorfeen, and likewise Durstine into Dursteen.

  3 Rabbi Jacob Tarlau, of Flushing, L. I. (private communication, April 30, 1937), tells me that Katz has nothing to do, as it is sometimes assumed, with the identical German word, signifying a cat. It is a characteristic Hebrew abbreviation of two words, kohen tzedek, and indicates that the man bearing it is a descendant of Aaron, and hence a priest. The name of a late chief rabbi of France, Zadoc Kahn, was simply Katz reversed.

  1 New York, 1942, p. 50.

  2 A general officer in the Civil War and the first Governor of Alaska. His descendants retain the name unchanged.

  3 The thing, of course, runs the other way, and Polish-American writers encounter difficulties when they try to represent American loan-words in Polish print. I offer a few examples from Oredownik Jezykowy, a Polish monthly published at St. Francis, Wis., by the Rev. B. E. Goral: ajskrimsoda (ice-cream-soda), akjurejt (accurate), autsajd (outside), baj gasz (by gosh), Dzio (Joe), bendedz (bandage), berykejda (barricade), blosz (blush) and blesfana (blast furnace).

  4 The name of a distinguished engineer (1861–1940) whose mother, Helena Modjeska (1844–1909) was a distinguished actress. The difference between the feminine and masculine suffixes will be noted. The Poles, like the Russians, also inflect proper names for case, etc.

  5 I am indebted for these examples to Mr. Charles C. Arensberg, of the Pittsburgh Bar. They come from the records of the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas. Most Poles applying for registration of new names explain why they want to get rid of their old ones. Some of these reasons are that the old name is “hard to spell and pronounce,” or is “embarrassing socially and in business,” or that the new one is the name of some American relative-in-law or a cherished friend, or is “of better euphony.”

  6 Death notice, New York Times, Oct. 6, 1940.

  7 Same, same, March 20, 1946. I am indebted for the last two to Mr, Alexander Kadison.

  1 Baltimore Sun, Jan. 28, 1936. Dr. Alfred Senn says in Lithuanian Surnames, American Slavic and East European Review, Aug., 1945, p. 134, that -ski in Poland designated nobility and that many parents had their children registered under names so terminating in order to smooth their way in life.

  2 What’s Your Name?, pp. 11–13.

  3 The Americanization of Slovak Surnames, Slovak R
eview, Autumn, 1946, pp. 67–73.

  1 Kramoris has kindly given me access to a much more extensive paper, Notes on the Americanized Slovak Surname, but it is not yet published.

  2 pp. 486–88.

  3 Czech Surnames in America, American Mercury, May, 1925; The Americanization of Czech Surnames, American Speech, Dec., 1925; Czech-American Names, Czechoslovak Student Life (Lisle, III.), April, 1928.

  4 Life reported in 1946 that one of its photographers, Jerry Cooke, “was born Jury Kuchuk, of Russian parents.” The New Yorker, March 9, 1946, p. 20, mentioned a New York orchestra leader named Coolidge, originally the Russian Kudisch. Variety, Nov. 17, 1943, recorded the death of a Victor Hyde who immigrated to America as a Russian dancer named Haidbura. Many female dancers bearing Russian names are actually Englishwomen. Boris Karloff, the movie actor, says in Who’s Who in America that his real name is William Henry Pratt.

  1 I am indebted here to the kindness of Dr. Alfred Senn, of the University of Pennsylvania, the foremost American authority on Lithuanian.

  2 Lithuanian Surnames, by Alfred Senn, before cited, pp. 127–37 – a paper read at a meeting of the Modera Language Association in New York, Dec. 28, 1944. In an earlier form it was read at a meeting of the Linguistic Society of America at Chapel Hill (N.C.), July 11, 1942.

  3 The Lithuanian republic was launched Aug. 1, 1922, and sunk without trace by the Russian liberators July 21, 1940.

  1 pp. 492–93.

  2 Finnish Surnames in America, Feb., 1939, pp. 33–38.

  1 John Morton, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, was the descendant of a Finn named Marttinen. Albert Payson Terhune, the writer about dogs (1872–1942), was descended from a Finnish Terhunen. The Finnish republic was established June 17, 1919; its liquidation by the Russian liberators began Nov. 30, 1939.

  2 pp. 490–92.

  3 The Swedish Surname in America, American Speech, Aug., 1928, pp. 468–77.

  4 The Study of American Place-Names of Swedish Origin, Covenant Quarterly, Nov., 1946, pp. 1–16.

  1 This practise still survives in Iceland, and it survived in the Shetland Islands, which were settled by Scandinavians, until the middle of the Eighteenth Century, e.g., Margaret Nicholsdaughter was the sister of John Nicolson. See A Shetland Merchant’s Day-Book in 1762, by William Sandson; Lerwick, 1934. Lerwick is the most northerly town in the British Isles.

  1 Mr. Charles F. Dery tells me of a Rhode Islander born in Quebec whose Swedish great-grandfather became Munson there, and who is himself now Mongeon.

  2 It was thus that Professor C. H. Seashore, of the University of Iowa, translated Sjöstrand.

  3 John Adolf Dahlgren (1809–70), a Federal admiral in the Civil War and the inventor of the cannon bearing his name, was of Swedish ancestry. When he occupied Charleston in Feb., 1865, the commander of the collaborating land force was General Schimmelpfennig.

  1 I am indebted here and for most of what follows to the work of Dr. Marjorie M. Kimmerle. Her doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin, written under the direction of Dr. Einar Haugen, professor of Scandinavian languages, was devoted to a study of the names in the church records of two Norwegian Lutheran congregations in Dane county, Wisconsin. This dissertation was summarized in Norwegian-American Surnames, Norwegian-American Studies and Records (Northfield, Minn.), Vol. XII, 1941, pp. 1–32. Dr. Kimmerle has since published Norwegian-American Surnames in Transition, American Speech, Oct., 1942, pp. 158–65, and A Study in Connotation, in Elizabethan Studies and Other Essays in Honor of George F. Reynolds, University of Colorado Studies, Oct., 1945, pp. 337–43.

  1 Norwegian-American Surnames, before cited, p. 17.

  2 The reference here, of course, is to rural Norway. In the larger towns the merchants began to take surnames in the Fifteenth Century, chiefly influenced by German example. The names of the nobles and of the learned were also imitations of German usage. The clergy did not use family names until the Seventeenth Century.

  3 Dr. Harold S. Palmer, of the University of Hawaii, writes: “My mother was born in Norway and her maiden name was Schjøth, which I cannot pronounce properly, though it is my middle name and also my older brother’s. I usually use only the middle initial, and when I have to give my name in full I avoid the ø. I try for an umlaut over the o if I think it will stick. If not, I use oe.”

  1 I am indebted here to Mr. Wallace Lomoe, of Milwaukee. His own name, originally Lömoe, is now pronounced LaMoe, with the accent on the second syllable.

  2 Norwegian Surnames, by George T. Flom, Scandinavian Studies and Notes, Vol. V, No. 4, 1918, pp. 139–54.

  3 Edvard Grieg, by David M. Johansen; New York, 1938, p. 11. I am indebted here to Dr. Einar Haugen. Greig or Gregg is a common Scottish surname, traced by Black to c. 1214. Danes and Norwegians who settled in isolated American communities, out of contact with their countrymen, sometimes had their surnames changed without their let or leave. In Among the Isles of Shoals; Boston, 1878, Celia Thaxter tells of one named Ingebertsen who invaded that remote region. “To expect any Shoaler,” she says, “to trouble himself to utter such a name as that was beyond reason. At once they called him Carpenter apropos of nothing at all, for he never had been a carpenter. The name was the first that occurred to them.”

  1 I borrow most of these from Personal Names in Hawaii, by John E. Reinecke, American Speech, Dec., 1940, p. 350.

  2 I am indebted here to Mrs. G. A. Meek, of Oakland, Calif. Mr. Charles J. Lovell tells me that it is also common for Smith to be substituted for Silva. In New Bedford, Mass., Sylvia is the commonest surname, followed by Smith, which conceals many Silvas. Third place is held by Perry.

  3 Albert R. Lopes, of Loyola University, New Orleans.

  4 Amigos (Chicago), Oct., 1941.

  5 I take this from Personal Names in Hawaii, lately cited, p. 350.

  6 pp. 481–82 and 495.

  1 Creole Dialect of Missouri, American Speech, April, p. 119 n. 29.

  2 It is described by John Francis McDermott in French Surnames in the Mississippi Valley, American Speech, Feb., 1934, pp. 28–30. There were patronymics, dit names referring to some personal characteristic or item of personal history, and names borrowed from estates. The latter did not always descend to sons, who not infrequently acquired estates and names of their own. Thus Charles Le Moyne (1656–1729) a famous figure in early Canadian history, had the territorial surname of Longueuil, but five of his sons came to fame in Louisiana as Iberville, Bienville, Sauvolle, Chateaugué and Serigny.

  3 Reported from Bristol, Conn., by Mr. Epaphroditus Peck; private communication, July 2, 1936.

  4 Name Tragedies, by C. P. Mason, American Speech, April, 1929, p. 329.

  5 The last three are reported from northern Vermont by Mrs. Albert T. Stearns; private communication, July 3, 1937.

  6 The eponym of Bunker Hill was not a Bon Coeur, but the descendant of an English Bunker who immigrated before 1635. See AL4, p. 481, n. 2. But I am informed by Mr. Barrington S. Havens, of Schenectady, N. Y. (private communication, March 3, 1938), that his own paternal grandmother was a Bunker descended from a French Huguenot Bon Coeur who came to America by way of England and founded a family long settled on Nantucket.

  7 Mr. Alexander Johnson, of Fort Wayne, Ind., tells me (private communication, Jan. 28, 1924) that he once encountered a man in Switzerland county, Indiana, who spelled his name Thibaud and pronounced it Kabo. In Missouri Thibaud or Thibeau has become Teebo.

  8 The last five are from Notes on French-Canadian Proper Names in New England, by Robert E. Pike, American Speech, April, 1935, p. 118. Pike also records some translations, e.g., Lapierre to Stone and Boisvert to Greenwood.

  9 Jesse Lee Reno, a Union major-general in the Civil War, was killed leading a charge at South Mountain, Sept. 14, 1862. One of his sons, Jesse Wilford, invented the escalator, and another, Conrad, made inventions in the field of radio. Reno, Nev., the divorce metropolis, was named after the general. Mr. Victor T. Reno, of Los Angeles (private c
ommunication, May 30, 1946), tells me that the founder of the American family was a Huguenot who came to America about 1700.

  1 A Tragedy of Surnames, by Fayette Dunlap, Dialect Notes, Vol IV, Part I, 1913, pp. 7–8.

  2 I am indebted here to Mr. Hartford Beaumont, of New York; private communication, March 11, 1938.

  3 The last five are from Corruptions. by Francis Dale, a letter to the New York Times dated April 16, 1929.

  4 The last four are reported from Vermont by Mr. Paul St. Gaudens; private communication, Nov. 1, 1943. He tells me that his own name is frequently changed to Gordons or Gordon.

  5 p. 112.

  6 p. 482.

  7 A Diary of America; New York, 1839, p. 153.

  8 It is not listed by Ewen, but Charles Wareing Bardsley, in his Dictionary of English and Welsh Surnames; London, 1901, reports that there was a Thomas Paybodie at Oxford in 1615. What the name means, he goes on, “I cannot say.”

  9 But the name of the Missouri river town is pronounced Jirrárdo.

  10 I am indebted here to Lieut. Col. F. G. Potts, U.S.A., ret., of Mt. Pleasant, S. C.; private communication, Jan. 20, 1945.

  1 The Anglicization of Italian Surnames in the United States, American Speech, Feb., 1943, pp. 26–32.

  2 Frances Winwar is a well known woman writer who was brought from her native Italy at the age of seven as Francesca Vinciguerra.

  3 Says Dr. Vincenzo Campora in Hammonton Notes, Columbus (New York), Sept., 1945, p. 7: “Hammonton was … founded by Charles K. Landis, a Philadelphia gentleman whose original name in the Seventeenth Century was Landi, changed to Landis when the family immigrated to America from Italy.”

  4 Says Campora, just quoted, p. 36: “Lino Rubba is an executive of high calibre and has a very amiable personality. So is his worthy partner, Frank Rubba. Another brother of theirs is Capt. Russell, M.D., serving overseas.”

  5 Here I am indebted to Mr. Charles C. Arensberg, of Pittsburgh.

  1 See AL4, pp. 493–94.

  2 United Press dispatch from Chicago, July 8, 1941. On April 29, 1947, a Baltimorean named Henry Wise Wood Distler petitioned the local Circuit Court for permission to resume the ancient surname of his family, to wit, Distler und Derecsenyi zu Dercsen, and it was granted by Judge Edwin T. Dickerson.