GERMAN-NOBILITY-L Archives

From:
Subject: Name spellings in transliterations
Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2004 22:44:30 Africa/Johannesburg

> > The Russian Empire branch of the von Bergs were originally poor
> > Baltic-German nobles of
> > Livland - the family is best known for two writers and 1 field-marshal.
> >
>
> Berg is not necessarily Bergh, there were a number of families named Berg,
> Berge, Bergh, that were ennobled and have no familial relationship to each
> other.
>
> G. v. Studnitz

True, True,
if one takes the Latinized spellings, but in the Russian Military and Noble Encyclopaedias
and Biographies they are in cyrillic, which spells West European names phoentically, and
they all end up being spelt phoentically ie as "Berg".
Yes, I do know that in West Europe Berg, Bergh, Berge would be different families.
That is why Russian spellings of West European surnames can really confuse the issue, and
one needs to take that into consideration.
The noble Baltic-German-via-Sweden family Stahl (in German) gets spelt in Russian as
Stahl, Stal, Stal', Staal, Schtal, - unfortunately one needs to cross-check under all
variations because we are talking about phoentic transliteration, which is the
genealogists bugbear alright. Yes, we do pull our hair out over these
trans-alphabetical-spellings because there are German, English (US) and French systems of
transliteration.

Vera Beljakova






---------------------------------------------
This message was sent using Tiscali World Mail.
http://www.tiscali.co.za

This thread:

• Name spellings in transliterations by