Thoughts on transcribing

Much of what we cover in Buller Time depends on the expertise and efforts of a group of researchers who do the hard work of carefully examining original (often hand-written) documents in German, Russian, or even Polish and transcribing the words and numbers recorded there into a form that all of us can read, that of our standard Latin alphabet. Over the past few years we have benefited especially from the work of Glenn Penner, Steve Fast, Rod Ratzlaff, Richard D. Thiessen, and Tim Janzen, to name but a few.

I aspire to join their company someday (retirement is only ten or eleven years away), but for now we can appreciate and occasionally understand in a little more detail the work that they do. That is the point of this post.

Recently I came across an interesting webpage that offers “Ten Tips for Deciphering Old German Handwriting” (here), a helpful resource for anyone who wishes someday to transcribe records and documents from the Mennonite past. The very first tip addresses a question that we raised long ago: What is the meaning of the curved line (apostrophe, circumflex, circle) over the letter u in the name Buller recorded in the Przechowka church book (here)?

According to the webpage cited above,

“u” has a little “swoop” (my non-technical term) above it and “i” has a dot above it. Word of warning: sometimes the swoop or the dot can be slightly to the right of the actual letter itself. Notice also how everyone’s “swoops” can be slightly different, as seen in the real-life example of the word “gut” (good) below. [see the image on the website linked]

In other words, the presence or absence (as below) of the swoop does not indicate anything special about the quality of the vowel u. When used, the swoop signifies only that the letter below is a u. As one would expect, the shape of the swoop does not really matter, being a matter of personal style.

Nevertheless, the question remains: What was the usual (a better term than correct) pronunciation of our name in centuries past? Unless I am mistaken, German vowels are generally long when followed by a single consonant and short when followed by more than one consonant. Thus the u in Buller was probably pronounced/heard as a short vowel, and the pronunciation of our name that we all grew up with was probably in line with its historical pronunciation.

I invite any of the transcribers/researchers who occasionally stop by Buller Time to correct me if I have any of this wrong.