Reading and writing German!
Formal printed text in German presents another complication to even those familiar with the spoken language. Until the mid-twentieth century documents were produced in the Fraktur typeface (sometimes called Gothic or blacktype).
Before you can ask the translator to work on a document like the Psalm shown below, you will need to make a copy in a plain typeface.
Before you can ask the translator to work on a document like the Psalm shown below, you will need to make a copy in a plain typeface.
That is not as difficult as it may seem once you have learned a new alphabet. Just be careful of pairs of letters with very similar shapes.
Family Search offers a good brief introduction.
Brigham Young University offers a free on-line tutorial that includes instructions with examples, practice exercises and even tests. Do we all remember copy books?
If you want to print your own text to resemble the old-fashioned Fraktur, then you will need to have a suitable typeface (usually called a font) installed on your computer. A suitable type (named Schmalfette) can be downloaded free from the website 1001fonts.
You may also have heard about extra letters in the German alphabet. In fact they (or their near equivalent) were also used in medieval English but have dropped out of favour in modern times.
You have probably encountered a long s in even nineteenth century Australian documents and some scholars still insist on using a diphthong (æ) in certain words. What you see here are the German versions. If necessary, you can easily produce them on your keyboard by holding the Alt key and typing a three letter code on the number pad. So Alt+129 gets ü which is spoken as u-umlaut. (Use 132 for ä and 148 for ö). However many genealogy programs, such as Legacy, allow you to type umlauted vowels into a name with a mouse click. Most search engines which recognise * as a wild-card character will accept K*hn (for example) and return words with any vowel (with and without the umlaut) such as Kuhn, Kühn, Kohn and Köhn. |
Some Useful Links
The German Script Tutorial (Brigham Young University) http://script.byu.edu/Pages/German/en/welcome.aspx Handwriting Guide: German Gothic (Family History Library) http://feefhs.org/guides/German_Gothic.pdf German Genealogy—Language, Handwriting, and Script (Genealoger) http://www.genealoger.com/german/ger_german_language.htm Help for Translating That Old German Handwriting (My Ancestors and Me) http://www.nancysfamilyhistoryblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/helps-for-translating-that-old-german.html German (Omniglot) http://www.omniglot.com/writing/german.htm German handwriting (Suetterlin Schrift) http://www.suetterlinschrift.de/Englisch/Sutterlin.htm |