QOTD

[George Thompson]

JB: The tradition is that it was my paternal grandfather, with the
not-uncommon tale type that his Russian (not Icelandic) name (the one
allowed by the authorities of his region of emigration, beyond the pale)
was unpronounceable, according to the Ellis Island official of around 1905.

The immigration official who handled your grandfather's papers can't have
been Fiorello LaGuardia, then.  As a young man, he worked on Ellis Island,
handling immigrants who spoke Italian or Yiddish (his mother's family
language).

But isn't ...son or ...sohn a fairly common ending to (American) Jewish
names?  Are they all to be credited to hacks at Ellis Island?  (And my
impression, from the LaGuardia story, is that the bosses who staffed Ellis
Island chose people with at least some thought to their ability to speak
one or another of the languages likely to be spoken by the immigrants.
They would also know by the boat's port of origin whether the passengers
would mostly be speakers of Italian, or German, or Yiddish, &c.  Whether a
processor who spoke Finnish, or Bulgarian, or Slovenian would always be on
hand when needed is maybe doubtful.)

GAT


On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 4:48 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:

> At 8/18/2014 01:41 PM, W Brewer wrote:
>
>  JB:  <<His name doesn't end in -son.>>
>> WB:  Wonder if JB's daddy was Papa Ber ...
>>
>
> The tradition is that it was my paternal grandfather, with the
> not-uncommon tale type that his Russian (not Icelandic) name (the one
> allowed by the authorities of his region of emigration, beyond the pale)
> was unpronounceable, according to the Ellis Island official of around
> 1905.  My grandfather's father's given name was "Behr" (or some other
> spelling in Latin letters, and I don't know whether it was Russian,
> Yiddish, or Hebrew), and my grandfather became "Berson" (pronounced now as
> "Brr-son", as in the shiver of cold).  I have seen my grandfather's ship
> papers, from Hamburg of course, with a Russian name that neither I nor my
> brother can read, let alone pronounce.  (No translation of the name into
> German .. and even it there was, it would probably have been in the
> equally-unreadable Fraktur.)
>
> Joel
>
> P.S.  What region do I belong to if I distinguish "bear", "beer", "burr",
> and "brr"?
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



-- 
George A. Thompson
The Guy Who Still Looks Stuff Up in Books.
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998..

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org