The FENRICH surname (404 total words in this text) (390 Reads) 
The evolution in spelling and pronunciation is not at all uncommon with Germanic names.
In German, FAEHNRICH would be equivalent to the spelling and pronunciation of
FAHNRICH - the “ae” combination is replaceable by the umlauted letter “a” - an umlaut being the “two-dot” accent mark. (my message here: as I can’t make an umlauted A or a, I’ll just surround that letter with quotation marks and you’ll know it should be an umlauted A or a) appearing over this vowel. An umlauted “a” in German is pronounced very much like the way we English speakers pronounce the short sound of our letter “e”, as in the word, “sent.”
So a German-speaker would pronounce both FAEHNRICH and F”A”HNRICH phonetically as
FEHN RICH (also with the glottal [throaty] German pronunciation of the letters “-ich” which makes it should more like RICK).
FAEHNRICH and F”A”HNRICH are virtually the same name in German - just executed differently on paper, and dependent upon whether the scribe chose to use the “ae” combination versus the “a.” It would be no big stretch to find documents using the spelling of
FENRICH, either (although FENRICH may more likely be an Anglicization of the original German name,) since spelling in previous eras was not standardized and whoever WROTE the name down - whether it was the ancestor who bore it, a priest or minister, a clerk, or anyone else was spelling it in accordance with his own abilities to hear, phoneticize and write…and these abilities varied greatly from one person to the next. Also, there are common causes where the bearer of a name was either unable or unwilling to offer a correction in spelling to the person executing it on a record - even if the name-bearer recognized that a discrepancy had occurred.
Especially, using German rules of language and pronunciation, FAEHNRICH,
F”A”HNRICH, and FENRICH would be identically pronounced. You can roughly compare this phenomenon to my own surname of
HELLER, which appears in many church register entries in Baden as H”A”LLER or
HAELLER, as well as HELLER (even in records for the same parties or families.) It’s the same name, but varies according to who wrote it. While I’m no language expert (certainly not in German), the above situation happens with lots of those seeking Germanic-surnamed ancestors…
Courtesy of Carla Heller (mscarlah@earthlink.net)
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