What is the “correct” spelling of our name?

To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, there are certain things about our family that are known knowns; we know we know them (e.g., Peter D, Sarah, and family came to the U.S. in 1879). There are also known unknowns: we know that we don’t know who David Buller’s parents were. Part of the fun of historical exploration is that it often uncovers a third category: unknown unknowns, that is, things that we didn’t previously know that we didn’t know.

Up to now, I think, the spelling of our last name has been in the third category. Because we have been so accustomed to seeing “Buller,” we did not consider whether this was the “correct” spelling at all. Now, I am not suggesting for a minute that there is only one way to spell our name and that all other spellings are incorrect. But it can be both instructive and geeky fun to explore the question of how our family name has been spelled over the last several centuries.

A simple Google search of the words Buller last name origin leads to several interesting proposals about the origin of our name, as well as at least one historical note worth pursuing at some point in the future:

This most interesting surname is of either Old French or early medieval German origin, and has three possible interpretations. Firstly, it may be of Old French origin as an occupational name for a scribe or copyist, from the Old French, Middle English “bulle”, letter, document. Secondly, it may be a French habitational name, possible from “Bouille”; the “-er” may have arisen by analogy with other Norman placenames in “-iere”. Finally, it may be of early medieval German origin, from the Middle High German “bullen”, to roar, which was a nickname for a man with a loud voice. The surname first appears in the Church Registers of early German States in the 16th Century.… Other early examples of the surname include: the birth of a son to Peter and Klara Buhler, in 1588 at Arnstedt, Schwarzburg-Sonderhausen; and the marriage of John Buller and Phillippa Percyvell on April 14th 1603 at St. Nicholas’s, Cole Abbey, London.” (see The Internet Surname Database, which also sells the faux scroll pictured to the right)

Not to be missed in this recital of known knowns and known unknowns is a crucial fact: the surname Buller originated independently in two different contexts: England and the Germanic sphere. We are no doubt derived from the latter, not from the former, who came to the U.S. two centuries before the Mennonite Bullers. This distinction is important to keep in mind when one sees Buller crests, coats of arms, and explanations that Bullers were originally scribes; these have nothing to do with our family.

All that is background and laying the foundation for the real point of this post: to explore how our family name has been spelled—and thus likely was pronounced—over the last few centuries. We take as our primary body of evidence the church registers from Przekhovka and Alexanderwohl. But first, a necessary reminder: during the period in question, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the rules of writing were far less important than they are today. Writing was governed primarily by what was heard; the goal of writing was to reproduce pronunciation, not to follow an authoritative set of rules that specified how a word should be spelled. So, when we see variations in how our name has been spelled, we should keep in mind that these are a matter of variation in pronunciation or the recording of pronunciation, not of right or wrong spellings.

We begin with the initial Buller section in the Przekhovka register.

Nothing unusual with the spelling of Buller here, apart from the use of -s on the end of female names discussed earlier. However, there is an odd mark above the letter u in one of the Bullers in this group of 50+ names.

My first thought was that this was likely a stray pen stroke, but later in the church register the mark pops up again. Number 1139, Jacob Buller, appears without a mark, but farther down on the same page, number 1151, a Buller whose first name is not known, has the same mark above the right side of the letter u. Four lines below that the mark appears with 1155, Elcke Bullers.

Subsequent appearances of Buller at first do not have the mark (1198, 1218, 1224, 1264, 1275, 1296, 1332, 1354, 1513) but generally do have it later on (1365, 1384, 1398, 1423, 1429, 1443, 1450, 1454, 1463, 1475, 1489, 1528, 1535, 1554, 1567, 1575; also when Peter Buller 359’s name is repeated on page 92). The possible meaning of this apostrophe-like mark will be taken up below.

Still later a new variation appears: what looks like a circumflex ( ˆ ) over the u. It appears clearly in numbers 1608 and 1615; the symbol is closed ( º ), whether by design or accident, in 1602 and 1609.

The variation in the mark used (apostrophe, circumflex, circle) is probably due to the fact that various writers added to the register; presumably they all signify roughly the same thing about how the name Buller was to be pronounced. What that pronunciation might have been becomes clearer when one examines the Alexanderwohl continuation of the church register.

In nearly every case the Alexanderwohl book uses an apostrophe-like mark (or a backward c) over the u in Buller, as seen below in Jacob, David (no, not that David), and Helena Buller.

Significantly, the Alexanderwohl register includes other diacritical marks over vowels, including an umlaut over the u in Hübert (what we know as the surname Huebert):

This tells the reader how to pronounce the name: HYOO-bert. There is a clear y sound preceding the u sound. Why is this important? The use of a mark other than an umlaut over the u in Buller implies that our name was not pronounced BYOO-ler. If the secretary writing in the Alexanderwohl book had heard BYOO-ler, he or she would have written our name with an umlaut.

So how was our name pronounced back in the day? The mark used most commonly may provide a hint. In all likelihood, this apostrophe-like mark/backward c is an apex, which Latin, and later other languages, used to mark a long vowel. The mark may indicate, therefore, that the u in Buller was not a short u (as in English push) or an umlaut u (as in Huebert) but a long u as in the English word boot.

I should note that this is not the standard understanding of our name. In fact, Gustav Reimer writes: “Buller (Büller) is a Mennonite family name in the Old Flemish congregations in West Prussia, first mentioned at Schönsee (Sosnovka) in 1695.” Unfortunately, he offers no historical citations of Buller spelled with an umlaut. If they exist, I have not yet seen them.

For the time being, then, the most that we can conclude is that our name was probably pronounced BOO-ler and spelled Buller with or without the apex (Buhler is another possible spelling of the same pronunciation). It is also possible that our name was pronounced BYOO-ler and spelled Büller (or Bueller, as in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). In fact, it is entirely possible that our name was pronounced BOO-ler in some places and at some times and as BYOO-ler in other places and times. Pronunciations are not static, even when names are concerned.

In all likelihood, our name never rhymed with fuller before our family came to the U.S. One wonders if the British pronunciation of the identically spelled but unrelated surname Buller led to our name being pronounced as most of us say it today. Perhaps some other, as yet unrecognized factor came into play. Another question for another day.

Source

Reimer, Gustav. 1953. Buller (Büller) family. Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online.