WHAT'S IN A NAME

Sometimes names change, due to innovation of technology. For a long, long time, names were written down. By monks, priests and clerks. But also by philosophers, story-tellers and historians. But the Gods go by many names and the result was a lot of diffusion, confusion and manipulation. The Industrial revolution got America in its grips and technological innovations flooded the market. An important one, was the invention of the typewriter. It was faster, more uniform and it could ceasy be copied or changed. In the debriefing report about dr. Werner von Braun, the Nazi rocketscientist, one sentence is changed. First the report contained the sentence, that von Braun was “an ardent Nazi”. This was later changet in to “not an ardent Nazi”. This one word made it possible for this ardent Nazi to continue his career in the United States. An with him hundreds of hundreds “not ardent Nazis”.

There are many stories about the development of the typewriter. There is a world-standard now, but how did they put the letters on the proper place? Generally accepted by historians is the “trial and errror”-methid. Running through all the posibilities, so you could type fluently and without disruptions. Well maybe, but with the first row of letters, it is possible to form the word “TYPEWRITER”.

This made it possible for the salesman to demonstrate, how easy “typing” was.

Of course the type-writer was immidiately recognised by the government as an important tool, to be informed about their citizens. Like in Napoleontic times, clerks went door to door to register your last name (Wurkjindewei!), now it was possible to register and keep in touch of a lot of personal information. But the typewriter was still being developed and they were scarce, had to be imported and distributed across the nation.

I live in “Friesland” and weird things happened here, when the names were registered. The problem is, that the Frisian language does not know the letter “ij”, but uses the letter “y” instead. Many names in this region contain the letter “y”. But the local administration decided that the “y” was backward and had to be adjusted to Dutch-grammar. So in the 19^th century most of the local names changed. “Sybenga” became “Sijbenga” for instance. The Frisians considered this not as an identity-loss. They were brainwashed to believe, that their language, culture and traditions were inferior. Sijbenga sounded more “dutch”. If, by any change, this happened to your first or last name, don't worry! In the 21^st century, it is possible to regain your traditional Frisian name, officially. This time you have to pay several hundred euros to make it happen and turn “Sijbenga” into Sybenga.