# Handel - Haendel - with or without umlauts



## MagneticGhost (Apr 7, 2013)

I've been a little perplexed recently by the sight of Handel's name spelt differently and sometimes with an umlaut. Never in my 40 years have I seen it this way before. 
I thought about holding a poll on the matter until asking a friend who replied JFGI.

So after JFG JFGI. I googled Handel and umlaut.
I found this informative and interesting blog on the matter and wanted to share it with you guys immediately.
http://blog.counterpointspublishing.com/2011/02/how-to-handle-spelling-handel/


----------



## moody (Nov 5, 2011)

MagneticGhost said:


> I've been a little perplexed recently by the sight of Handel's name spelt differently and sometimes with an umlaut. Never in my 40 years have I seen it this way before.
> I thought about holding a poll on the matter until asking a friend who replied JFGI.
> 
> So after JFG JFGI. I googled Handel and umlaut.
> ...


Where have you been,it's spelled Handel and always has been here.


----------



## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

moody said:


> Where have you been,it's spelled Handel and always has been here.


Even Handel spelled it differently as you can see from the blog.


----------



## MagneticGhost (Apr 7, 2013)

moody said:


> Where have you been,it's spelled Handel and always has been here.


That's my point! It's always been Handel so why do I keep seeing Händel on this forum. Not universally but a few times. This blog explains why.


----------



## moody (Nov 5, 2011)

MagneticGhost said:


> That's my point! It's always been Handel so why do I keep seeing Händel on this forum. Not universally but a few times. This blog explains why.


We are talking about present usage,if you look at the posts that use Haendel they are people trying to be clever dicks


----------



## MagneticGhost (Apr 7, 2013)

moody said:


> We are talking about present usage,if you look at the posts that use Haendel they are people trying to be clever dicks


Well yes! Unless they are German. In which case you can understand them using the German spelling.


----------



## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

The German Wikipedia entry indeed uses the Umlaut version (so does the Dutch).


----------



## Guest (Aug 1, 2013)

I always thought the ones who used the umlauts were heavy metal fans - you know, fans of bands like Mötley Crüe or Spın̈al Tap or Motörhead or Queensrÿche or Blue Öyster Cult.


----------



## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

Art Rock said:


> The German Wikipedia entry indeed uses the Umlaut version (so does the Dutch).


On a whim I looked it up and found that German Wikpedia also spells Schoenberg as "Schönberg," despite stating in the second sentence of the entry that the composer himself started using "Schoenberg" after expatriating to the States.


----------



## apricissimus (May 15, 2013)

I've even seen Stravinsky's name spelled in funny looking Russian letters. What's up with that?


----------



## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

DrMike said:


> I always thought the ones who used the umlauts were heavy metal fans - you know, fans of bands like Mötley Crüe or Spın̈al Tap or Motörhead or Queensrÿche or Blue Öyster Cult.


Motorhead's actually makes a bit of phonetic sense when in comes to pronunciation - I wouldn't be surprised if Ian Fraser Kilmister intended that. Motley Crue were so dumb I would imagine none of them realised that umlauts turned their name into sounding something like Mertley Creer.

Spinal Tap's was a clever dig at these sort of heavy metal mannerisms - placing umlauts over a consonant rather than a vowel!


----------



## Cheyenne (Aug 6, 2012)

I generally use Schönberg and Händel.. Sorry


----------



## brianvds (May 1, 2013)

From the article posted by the OP:

_A teacher of mine at Yale put it thusly, "The only people who are allowed to write Händel (or the standard varient Haendel) are the Germans; otherwise you'll seem pretentious."_

Well, the world does not only consist of Germans and Englishmen. My own native language is Afrikaans, which evolved from 17th century Dutch and German, with smatterings of Malay, Khoikhoi and other African languages, and a dollop of English influence. How shall a creole such as myself spell the man's name without seeming to be either pretentious or too conforming?

Well, I have sort of become used to Händel, so I'll stick to it. 

Goot heavens, I don't sink I vould be able to Händl zis much longer...


----------



## Cheyenne (Aug 6, 2012)

Dutch is close enough... Right!?


----------



## Guest (Aug 1, 2013)

brianvds said:


> From the article posted by the OP:
> 
> _A teacher of mine at Yale put it thusly, "The only people who are allowed to write Händel (or the standard varient Haendel) are the Germans; otherwise you'll seem pretentious."_
> 
> ...


My suggestion is to adopt a quasi-Hebrew methodology and only write the consonants - thus we come to Hndl.


----------



## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

DrMike said:


> My suggestion is to adopt a quasi-Hebrew methodology and only write the consonants - thus we come to Hndl.


I know his *music *is divine, but this is ridiculous. Besides, we'd need the vowel pointings and then we'd be bach to square one.:cheers:


----------



## Guest (Aug 1, 2013)

I think we should just dispense with his name and switch to a symbol to represent him. I understand that this symbol is no longer in use, and thus could be used:


----------



## MagneticGhost (Apr 7, 2013)

DrMike said:


> I think we should just dispense with his name and switch to a symbol to represent him. I understand that this symbol is no longer in use, and thus could be used:
> View attachment 22069


One like isn't enough. lol pmsl rofl (it's not a poll, I'm doing all three) :lol:


----------



## brianvds (May 1, 2013)

Cheyenne said:


> Dutch is close enough... Right!?


So how do the Dutch spell the man's name? Please tell me they don't have yet another variant!


----------



## Cheyenne (Aug 6, 2012)

brianvds said:


> So how do the Dutch spell the man's name? Please tell me they don't have yet another variant!


http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Friedrich_Händel With umlaut, generally. I even had one guy in a classical music store tell me not to spell Schoenberg as 'those Americans' spell it, for that wasn't proper or something.


----------



## HaydnBearstheClock (Jul 6, 2013)

In Germany, we spell his name with an umlaut: Händel, and this is the correct way of spelling it. But Handel is ok if you're in the US or in Britain, that's not considered incorrect in English as far as I know. I guess Haendel could also be used, but 'ae' is just an imitation of 'ä', so it's better to just use Händel instead.


----------



## apricissimus (May 15, 2013)

HaydnBearstheClock said:


> In Germany, we spell his name with an umlaut: Händel, and this is the correct way of spelling it. But Handel is ok if you're in the US or in Britain, that's not considered incorrect in English as far as I know. I guess Haendel could also be used, but 'ae' is just an imitation of 'ä', so it's better to just use Händel instead.


Why can't there be two (or more) correct spellings? Many people throughout history have spelled their names differently in different languages.

Also, would you say that someone writing a post in English (regardless of where you're from) should write "Handel" and not "Händel"?


----------



## Guest (Aug 1, 2013)

I suspect there are some in the US that spell it Handel or Haendel because we don't have a convenient button on our keyboards to type "ä." Somebody told me one time the shortcut for typing with German characters - the umlauts, as well as the ess-tset - but I have forgotten. I was at one point fluent in German, and still correspond with friends in Germany and Switzerland, but I lapsed into ae, oe, ue, and ss instead of the German characters, just because it was simpler and quicker.


----------



## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

DrMike said:


> My suggestion is to adopt a quasi-Hebrew methodology and only write the consonants - thus we come to Hndl.


That reads a bit like Czech to me.


----------



## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

And we haven't even gotten into what to do with his first and middle names. Georg Friedrich... George Frederick... George Frideric...


----------



## deggial (Jan 20, 2013)

^ the whole thing is a mess!


----------



## GiulioCesare (Apr 9, 2013)

Interesting.

I am not German, but I've been living in Germany for years now.

I actually know a guy called Händel. He's a friend of a friend, and I've met him several times at parties etc. When I found out what his last name was, I was ecstatic (and he was perplexed...).

So I hope the OP understands when I write Händel. Händel himself anglicized his last name, understandably, so it's obviously ok if people write Handel.

Also, Handel is German for "trade" or "commerce", and it would be pronounced quite differently (/'handl/ instead of /hɛndl/ in a phonetical transcription using the International Phonetic Alphabet), which makes it all the more weird for German speakers to use the version without umlaut.

There's another point I believe is relevant to this discussion, and that I've never seen raised. These days, the English pronunciation of Handel and the German pronunciation of Händel are different (/'hændl/ vs /'hɛndl/) but, and here's the interesting bit, they were identical in Händel's time. Back then, the English would have pronounced Handel the way the New Zealanders would pronounce it these days: that is, the exact same way the Germans pronounce (and pronounced) Händel (/'hɛndl/).

British English underwent a vowel shift in the mid-twentieth century that saw the pronunciation of those a's (as in "cab", "back", "bat") move from /ɛ/ to /æ/. The shift is so recent that it can be observed in the same person: Queen Elizabeth II can be heard using the old pronuncation in early speeches, but she uses the modern one now for the same words.

University paper about this: http://phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/~jmh/research/papers/harrington00.jipa.pdf
Telegraph article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukn...Queens-English-changes-through-the-years.html

Incidentally, this phenomenon can also be heard in the accent of Stewie, the baby of the TV show Family Guy. The show creator and dub actor, Seth McFarlane, once said he took Stewie's overly affected accent from Rex Harrison, the British actor who desperately tried to teach Audrey Hepburn how to speak proper high-class English in the film My Fair Lady.

You will forgive me for this rant, but I'm a Händel hooligan and a linguist, and well...


----------



## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

GiulioCesare said:


> The shift is so recent that it can be observed in the same person: Queen Elizabeth II can be heard using the old pronuncation in early speeches, but she uses the modern one now for the same words.
> 
> University paper about this: http://phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/~jmh/research/papers/harrington00.jipa.pdf
> Guardian article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukn...Queens-English-changes-through-the-years.html
> ...


Of course I forgive you. Language is important. The blog points out that in Italy, Handel spelt his name as Hendel to match the German pronunciation.

One difficulty though, you've labelled it Guardian article but it's actually from the Telegraph. This may produce apoplexy in left wing readers being directed to a true blue newspaper.


----------



## GiulioCesare (Apr 9, 2013)

Taggart said:


> Of course I forgive you. Language is important. The blog points out that in Italy, Handel spelt his name as Hendel to match the German pronunciation.
> 
> One difficulty though, you've labelled it Guardian article but it's actually from the Telegraph. This may produce apoplexy in left wing readers being directed to a true blue newspaper.


Oops, thanks for pointing that out to me. Corrected. 

And yes, Hendel would indeed be the best way to get the Italians to pronounce "Händel" as in the original German, as a tonic e is pronounced /ɛ/ in most Italian regions (and they'd probably just butcher Händel anyway). Smart chap, this Georg.


----------



## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

I wonder if Handel ever used the names 'Georgio Federico' at any time i.e on the manuscripts of his early Italian commissions? I ask this because Mozart Italianised his first two names to 'Wolfgango Amadeo'* occasionally (or maybe his father did so on his behalf), and Beethoven sometimes used 'Luigi' in some correspondence.

* the spelling surprised me as the letter W is rarely, if at all, seen in Italian.


----------



## HaydnBearstheClock (Jul 6, 2013)

apricissimus said:


> Why can't there be two (or more) correct spellings? Many people throughout history have spelled their names differently in different languages.
> 
> Also, would you say that someone writing a post in English (regardless of where you're from) should write "Handel" and not "Händel"?


Yes, Handel is ok for English, I wrote that in my post.


----------

