[PRCo] Re: Good Gosh!

[Fred Schneider]

There was a similar story about a Pennsylvania German town on the  
North Penn Branch of the Reading railroad outside of Allentown.   I  
heard the tale from my first wife's family who lived in that area.    
The story goes that a railroad sign painter neglected to insert a  
small character over the letter N in the word Emaus that indicated  
that it was a double N.   Because the railroad had so much power in  
those days, the tale goes that the city fathers obligingly accepted  
the change in the name of the town from Emmaus to Emaus and it  
persisted until the 1950s when the city fathers restored the double  
"n".  But by then the German language character was no longer part of  
the equation.

Was it true or not?   I haven't a clue.   By the time I struggled to  
learn the German language, the only single character representing an  
identical double letter is the ß which indicates a double s (or ss),  
but only lower case.  A Good example would be Straßenbahn which is  
equivalent to Strassenbahn, the German word for street railway.  I  
suspect the story I was told was an old wives tale.   I have never  
seen a double n symbol in old fractur script nor have I encountered  
in in my many attempts to decipher old family birth certificates and  
bapitismal records from church and town records in Germany in the  
1750-1850 period.

I suspect, if there is any validity to the story, the sign painter  
simply forgot one letter "N".




On May 5, 2008, at 7:55 PM, Bob Rathke wrote:

> Actually, Ken, you spelled it correctly, just the way Moses  
> Cleaveland did
> over 200 years ago.
>
> The story (not sure if it's true) is that sometime around 1800 a  
> newspaper
> there didn't have enough space to typeset "Cleaveland" in their  
> masthead, so
> they shortened it to "Cleveland", and the revised spelling stuck.
>
> Bob 5/5/08
>
> -----------------------------
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Ken & Tracie" <ktjosephson at embarqmail.com>
> To: <pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org>
> Sent: Monday, May 05, 2008 3:22 PM
> Subject: [PRCo] Good Gosh!
>
>
>> I can spell "Cleveland", really!
>>
>> K.
>>
>
>