What in the Name of Böhm-Bawerk?!?
7 May 2019A recent post to Facebook by Timo Virkkala reminds me of one of my peeves.
Eugen Ritter von Böhm-Bawerk died on 27 August 1914. The Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrated in 1918. The Austrian state eliminated titles of nobility as such with a law passed on 3 April 1919, which law came into effect on 10 April 1919.
Had von Böhm-Bawerk lived into 10 April 1919, then he would have been given various choices as to what to do with his name. One of his choices would have been to change it to Eugen Böhm von Bawerk
, which could alternately be spelled Eugen Boehm von Bawerk
.[1][2] But of course he didn't, 'cause he'd been dead for almost five years.
Still, the Austrian central bank, the US Library of Congress, and that wretched mess Wikipedia decided to pretend that he'd done just that. He didn't adopt that name, his acolytes and admirers didn't and don't call him by that name, and he might have done something quite different (such as omitting the [Ritter] von
altogether, which would have left his name more like its earlier form) if he'd been compelled to make a choice; but the Austrian state, the LoC, and Wikipedia still insist on sophomorically transforming his name into that form.
[1] The umlaut ( ¨
) is an extremely stylized superscripted e
. An umlaut may be replaced by writing an e
after the letter over which the umlaut had been written; simply omitting an umlaut without replacement is illiterate.
Unfortunately, the modern glyph for the umlaut is indistinguishable from that of the diæresis, and the louts in Unicode Consortium decided to pretend that the two were the same character. (Yes, we've hit three of my peeves in this entry.) When not written diacritically, a diæresis should not be replaced by an e
. (I've not seen that done, so it doesn't count as a peeve.)
[2] The [Ritter] von Bawerk
might still look like a title of nobility, but it would not have counted as such. And somehow such reärrangements were seen as important.
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