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Sunday, June 14, 2009

Psst...what did they say his name was again?

In the Spring issue of Slavfile Liv Bliss recommends Jim Shipp's Russian English Dictionary of Surnames for tracking down names that have been transliterated into Cyrillic. That's a book I'd like to see.

Ever heard of the famous French diver Kusto? Or Franklin Roosevelt's envoy to Moscow Josef Davis?

Okay, my first example is really easy, and the second one is really easy to find out.

But what about the Лорд Ридлинг (Lord Riedling? Lord Readling?) I encountered a while back? No name and no personal context, other than the fact that he was a well-known English Jew.

The general context is May 1939, and some of the mysterious lord's contemporaries are one Лорд Винтертон ("Lord Vinterton") and a German referred to as нацистский представитель Волтхат ("the Nazi representative Voltkhat").

Cyrillic masks removed, the men were: Lord Winterton (easy), Helmuth Wohlthat and...

Sir Rufus Isaacs, 1st Marquess of Reading!

I wasted a lot of time beating my head on the Internets searching for various English spellings of Ридлинг before it dawned on me that it wasn't a very English-sounding title and might be misspelled. In another 5 minutes I found the man.

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