On Apr 28, 3:23 pm, RookHouse <mor...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
>
> > While it didn't "solve" in the sense of providing
> > specific cir***stances for each of the first names
> > of Mr. L., it put things in historical perspective,
> > and it has demoted the issue from the "MYSTERY"
> > status to "mildly interesting trivia".
>
> Agreed. It's amazing how much time and effort can be spent in search
> of the most obscure historical facts. I wish I had more time to look
> into some of these things more closely.
My point that people in the past didn't treat their
names the way we do today was not really random,
and was not too speculative. One may follow the
signatures and addressing themselves by Mozart
or Chopin (Szopen, etc) family to get an illustration.
Going back in the past of Europe, educated Europeans
would use a loocal flavor of their name as well as
the latin version. They would sign their correspondence
differently for correspondents from different countries,
as Copernicus would.
In the Eastern Europe the national boundaries
varied wildly and widely. You could live
in Russia, then in Rumunia then under the Austrian
empire, or in Poland; then there was also Ukraine.
Things were variable also up North: Poland,
Lithuania, Russia, Prussia, ... This is why
the first name of Akiba Rubinstein was not firmly
or uniquely establishe: Akiba or Akiva or ... ?
Anyway, many names got transliterated first from
Polish to Russian or German, than over a hundred
years later back to Polish, after WWI (my grandma
was educated hence it was her task to translate
the Russian and German demographical data - I mean,
of individuals and families - into Polish; many
people were busy this way at the time).
Best regards,
Wlod
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