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Translation - art & business » Linguistics »
Hitler in French, d'Hitler or de Hitler
Thread poster: Lidia Morejudo
Lidia Morejudo
Lidia Morejudo  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 06:40
English to Spanish
+ ...
Jan 3, 2009

I have found examples of both in internet, and as I am not a native speaker I am not sure if in French it is pronounced as it is in German with softly aspirated H or with no H at all.
Anybody knows?
 
Steffen Walter
Steffen Walter  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 07:40
Member (2002)
English to German
+ ...
Terminology/KudoZ question Jan 3, 2009

Hi Lidia,

Since this is a question related to terminology (or rather native usage), it should best be asked in the KudoZ (term[inology] help) section of ProZ.com at http://www.proz.com/?sp=k2 (selecting "French monolingual" as the language pair, i.e. French>French).

Best regards,
Steffen
 
Jacek Sierakowski
Jacek Sierakowski
Belgium
Local time: 07:40
English to French
+ ...
d'Adolphe Hitler Jan 3, 2009

Circumventing the difficulty...
 
Arnaud HERVE
Arnaud HERVE  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 07:40
English to French
+ ...
Both Jan 4, 2009

The correct grammar would be "de Hitler", because in this case the H is considered a consonant.

Some people who know German will even pronounce the German H.

However, the colloquial use is "d'Hitler".

I would advise "de Hitler" if it's a cultured, or official text.

[Edited at 2009-01-04 22:05 GMT]
 
frederique sannier-lowry
frederique sannier-lowry  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 07:40
English to French
de Hitler Jan 6, 2009

Hitler is a Germanic name (like haricot), so no liaison and no deletion of schwa in the preceding word. That's according to the book. But the familiar usage doesn't care about all that, so d'Hitler is ok if the context is not too formal.
Basically just like Arnaud said
 
Pascal Grandpierre
Pascal Grandpierre  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 07:40
Member (2007)
English to German
+ ...
de Hitler Jan 6, 2009

I would use de Hitler as "Hitler" is a surname. It also sound strange to me as German and French native speaker to use "d'Hitler"
 
Neil Coffey
Neil Coffey  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 06:40
French to English
+ ...
Changing fashion? Jan 9, 2009

frederique sannier-lowry wrote:

Hitler is a Germanic name (like haricot), so no liaison and no deletion of schwa in the preceding word. That's according to the book. But the familiar usage doesn't care about all that, so d'Hitler is ok if the context is not too formal.
Basically just like Arnaud said


Frédérique - I couldn't say for certain that this is the case with "Hitler", but over time, there seems to have been a shift in fashion towards using hiatus in this kind of case with a foreign name. (I don't know that there's actually much distinction in practice between Germanic vs non-Germanic cases, though I can believe that some prescriptivists have argued for this.)

Examples I've seen from writing around the turn of the (20th) century appear to use contraction (e.g. one that stands in my mind is "d'York" for "de York") in cases where nowadays, few native speakers would do so. So maybe part of the variation that the poster is seeing depends on the age of the text they're looking at?
 


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