T -names, When my Gx3 grandfather came over, he spelled our name Thrun. On
the land purchase documents it was and still is Truhn. What happened?
Eric Truhn
Hello Eric,
Truhnmtruhn@aol.com wrote:
T -names, When my Gx3 grandfather came over, he spelled our name Thrun. On
the land purchase documents it was and still is Truhn. What happened?
In former times, most german words starting with a letter 'T' that had
a pronounced vowel in them were written 'Th...', e.g. 'Thron'
(throne), 'Th�r' (door), 'Thor' (gate). You can find a lot of these
words in older records.
Later spelling changed and the vowel could be pronounced by writing an
'h' after it. Often the 'h' was omitted at all. So todays writing for
common things changed to 'T�r' (door) and 'Tor' (gate). Only some
royal and religious words still use the 'Th' like 'Thron' (throne) or
'Thor' (nordic godhead).
Your father may have changed his name according to the above change in
spelling. On the other hand, names weren't always changed like common
words.
Therefore another reason could be that he didn't want his name to be
mispronounced by english people. The english 'th' is pronounced very
different to the german 'th' or 't'.
My above statement is plain guessing. I' not a linguistic person,
maybe other people can say more about this.
Kind regards, Juergen