Spelling and Geography...

As a middle schooler, I briefly became my grandfather's proof reader and spell checker for his business paperwork. He owned a carpentry business, and when the time came to send out bills with a description of services performed, he felt limited by his command of the English language. He had been educated in Hungarian in school, spoke a hybrid of German and Slovak at home growing up and later learned English when he came to the United States. Whenever I corrected his frequent spelling errors, he would usually go off on a tirade about how English was a confusing, complicated language. My mom said that part of his problem was that the languages of his youth were mostly phonetic languages. A word was spelled how it was pronounced. If the pronunciation varied, so did the spelling. Easy peasy...or not...

I think this is as good a time as any to talk about the spelling variations, name variations and changes in the geopolitical landscape that I came across in my research. It can get confusing. Take my own personal ethnic heredity as an example. My mother considered herself Slovak. My father's family was Czech. Growing up in the middle of the 20^th century, I identified as being someone of Czechoslovakian descent. Then, after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the freeing of the Soviet bloc countries from Soviet influence, Czechoslovakia, in 1993, became two separate countries – the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Was I still of Czechoslovakian descent or was I now half Czech, half Slovak? And it only gets more complicated the farther back in history I looked...

In the 1500s, Jacob Hutter, from whom the Hutterites would get their name, became leader of a group of Anabaptists living in Tyrol (that would become part of Austria) who had most likely migrated from Bavaria (that would become part of Germany) and would soon move to find more religiously tolerant villages in Moravia (that would become part of Czechoslovakia, later the Czech Republic). Because of the Bavarian/Tyrolian roots of the Hutterites, German was their language, and remained their language. The North American Hutterites today still speak German and many of their writings are still in German. By the middle of the 1700s, most of the Hutterites lived within the boundaries of what was now the Habsburg Empire, eventually to become Austria-Hungary, a large area that included what we know today as Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, some random bits of the Balkans and snippets of Italy and Poland as well. It was during this time that Maria Theresa, empress of these lands, decided that the Hutterites really needed to convert to Catholicism...or else.

This mish-mash of people groups and languages makes for a variety of spellings and pronunciations for the names and places I encountered in my readings. Here is a cheat sheet to help us all going forward:

- Grandma's hometown, one of the longest and most stable Haban villages, is Sobotište, a Slovak spelling, but in most Hutterite writings it is spelled Sabatisch.

- Grandpa's hometown name gets complicated. At the time of his birth, his village would be called St. John in English, St. Johann in Hutterite writings and Svätý Ján in Slovak. When the communists took over Czechoslovakia in 1948, in keeping with their policy to wipe out all religious references, they renamed the small town near Moravia Moravský Ján. After the fall of the Soviet bloc in 1991, Grandpa's village was renamed again, now Moravský Svätý Ján.

- Grandma's maiden name was Pullman, a name found frequently in Hutterite writings. Because of subtle differences in pronunciation Pullman, Pollman, Bollman and Wollman, with variations of a single l and a double n, were all names for the same family.

- Grandpa's name was Cederle, a somewhat Americanized Slovakian spelling. On his diploma from trade school in Vienna, Grandpa's name is spelled Csederle. This is also the spelling that is found in baptismal records for Grandpa and his sisters. Older variations of spelling within the same family group included Zeterle and Czeterle. Say each one of these names aloud, as spelled, and they sound almost identical. (No wonder Grandpa was frustrated by English's insistence on one correct spelling.) The Hutterite spelling of Grandpa's family name, however, is the most unusual – Tschetter. Pronounced somewhat like the cheese, I thought it was an odd variation, until a childhood memory reminded me I had heard the word – well, at least of variation of it – before. Americans that we were, we pronounced Grandma and Grandpa's last name with an s-sound, like setter-lee. But when our grandparents were visited by friends from Czechoslovakia, they would always pronounce their name to sound more like chetter-lair and even chetter. When two of Grandpa's friends came to visit when I was a little child, I wondered why they had referred to my Grandpa as Andrew Cheddar