NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Mid XIX century Nav
From: Herbert Prinz
Date: 2005 Nov 29, 08:33 -0500
From: Herbert Prinz
Date: 2005 Nov 29, 08:33 -0500
I had said about Krusenstern: After a few more iterations of forth and back transliterations, the poor guy might end up being called "Crusiks" again. (That's apparently what the family started out with before one of them became a nobleman and adopted a more distinguished name.) and Alexandre E Eremenko replied: >This I doubt. "Stern" is clearly from "star", what "Kruse" or "Cruse" >means, I don't know. "Kreuz" is "cross". > > Alexandre, You are quite right to be skeptical. That was a silly copy-error. Please change that "Crusiks" into "Crusius". The full story is actually quite entertaining. It's a nice example of how upward mobility expressed itself in the olden times. Today, we may move into a better neighborhood as we climb the social ladder, but we keep our assigned social security numbers and names. It was not always like that. The oldest known member of the Krusenstern family was a certain Nicolaus Krause. The last name is fairly common. Some say that it refers to curly hair. Nothing really is known about Herrn Krause, except that some official records in a German town suggest that he was a respectable (wealthy) citizen. He had a son Johannes, who studied theology in Wittenberg. As it was the custom of the time to latinize one's name when joining academia, Krause became Crusius. ('Crusius' does not mean anything, as far as I can tell) Johannes had a son Philip, who studied law and became an envoy. On a mission to Russia and Persia he got shipwrecked near the coast of Estonia. There he entered into the service for the Swedish king who later knighted him. At this occasion another name change was called for: Crusius became Crusius von Krusenstiern. It stands to reason that Krusen- is, again, derived from Krause and has no deeper meaning besides that. -stern means star and might carry some hidden symbolic. Later generations dropped the 'Crusius' and were not quite consistent in the spelling of the -stiern (-stern, stjern, -stierna, etc.). Where our circumnavigator is concerned, it goes without saying that the adopted patronym Fedorovich is a Russian thing and we don't need to call Adam Johann by the name of Friedrichson in German. The family is still around and many members are figures of public life. One of them, Ewert von Krusenstjern, wrote a biography of Adam Johann and also a genealogy of the family. Herbert Prinz P.S. On transliteration I am probably guilty for having created some confusion with my remark about "linguistics not being a science". This was tongue in cheeks. Of course, linguistics is a science and scientific transliteration by all means is supposed to provide a bijective mapping between sequences of characters. Transliteration is not meant to be a translation from one language into another and it has nothing to do with pronunciation. Rather, it's a translation from one alphabet into another. The whole point of transliteration is that the original word (i.e. sequence of characters of the source alphabet) can be unambiguously restored from its representation in the target alphabet. The trick that makes it work despite different cardinality of alphabets is not to map individual letters onto each other, but sequences of letters. The problem is not that such a system is not possible (there are even established ISO standards for transliteration in place, so we don't need to resort to imperialism or totalitarism to implement them). The truth is that it is too cumbersome to follow through in everyday life. And of course, we can't apply current standards retroactively to stuff that happened centuries ago. Instead, we will make our search engines more intelligent. Having said all that, in the case of Krusenstern none of it comes into play. Here is an author with a German name, writing a book in German, and giving it a German title. What reason could an English speaking librarian have to spell the author's name in the catalog any different from how it appears on the title page of the book?