QOTD

[Joel S. Berson]

I've heard some of the same things George has about the better 
qualifications of immigration officials.  But I said it was a family 
tradition ...

I don't know about "son" as common among Jews, but I imagine it was 
common among many peoples who paid more attention to patronyms than 
to multi-generational family names.

Joel

At 8/19/2014 12:27 PM, George Thompson wrote:

>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

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