What’s in a Name?
The first question I get when someone looks at my name (checking into a hotel or an event, calling customer service, at a cocktail party with name tags) almost always implies the same thing: is there a typo on here?
No one is used to seeing a word that starts with “Gf.” In fact, in a college linguistics class, I was informed within the first week - possibly within the first day - that my last name contained “an illegal consonant cluster” (a heavy crime for a college freshmen, but thankfully one that carries no sentence).
I can say that the name is German, but that’s not much of an explanation. Last names like mine had “e”s or “a”s added between those two consonants starting at least several centuries ago. In German, “ge” starting a word is extremely common, usually part of conjugating a verb in the present perfect tense or to change the meaning of a word to include the concept of being in union or together with more than just one entity.
But somehow my people held onto the unusual (let’s not say illegal?) cluster against all odds. It might have helped that they were in a small town nestled at the foot of some mountains in a corner of Germany (or Austria, depending on the century) that wasn’t bothered by too many people. It might have helped that people always talked and spelled a little differently in Bavaria than in the northern and far western parts of Germany. It might have been that they were stubborn.
Today, according to educalingo, there are only three words still used in German that start with a “gf” - and in all three, they make an even more complicated consonant cluster: gfr.
Unsurprisingly, in German today there are much more common words to express these ideas than the three words above. Even lint didn’t want my consonant cluster. (The words are so archaic, google translate doesn’t even recognize them.)
I prefer to think that my last name came from an archaic form of the verb that evolved into today’s gefallen, which means ‘to please, like, or suit one’s taste,’ or that verb’s related noun Gefallen. (How do you know it’s the noun and not the verb? The first letter of a noun is always capitalized in German. They’re a very ordered people.) In its noun form, Gefallen means ‘well-liked.’
As it stands, it’s a super rare name in the world. According to Forebears.com, it’s the 4,114,744th most common name in the world. The site has ID’ed a whopping 22 people worldwide with it. (And I’m highly confident that the 22 people their algorithm found is an over-count, as I personally appear to be in there at least twice, and they are counting at least one person who I know is deceased.)
That said, someone somewhere in Germany or Austria is still pronouncing my name, and probably finding a way to say the G. When pressed, my father still would, although after living in this country nearly 60 years, he didn’t have a lot of patience for saying it with the G either.
So, here’s a primer on how you say my last name and pronounce both letters. Imagine saying those consonants together quickly, with no room for a vowel in between. It’s a little gutteral. You sort of have to place the edges of your tongue along the sides of your upper jaw, leaving a path of air open in the middle. You make that ‘g’ sound and then immediately have to push the sound of the ‘f’ out through that open path, bringing your lower lip to the front tip of your upper teeth. It’s as if the letter ‘f’ didn’t realize it wasn’t supposed to make the hissing sound that is usually the exclusive domain of the letter ‘s.’
Try it once in the privacy of your home or office. It’s not pretty. One may be prone to spit by accident just trying to do it. I don’t advise doing it often. And I would never recommend doing it in mixed company.
And that is why I simply tell people, when asked how to pronounce my name, that the easiest way to do it is to pretend the G is silent. I don’t actually say that it’s silent. I just encourage people to pretend. It’s easier that way.
That silent G, however, has added something to my life that’s more than just a consistently entertaining cocktail party conversation topic.
Because, after all, it’s the things that the rest of the world doesn’t see or doesn’t hear in us that make us more richly who we are. We might look like a lot of other people. We might sound like a lot of other people. But that thing that other people don’t know - that silent G and everything that we can unpack from it - ultimately shaped us.
My literal silent G has given me a lot of gifts: patience, humility, empathy, creativity, and a deep sense of my heritage, among many others. How? For starters, I never assume someone knows how to say my name. It’s not their fault that they are struggling to twist their tongues around my unique consonant cluster. They aren’t bad people or dumb, they just haven’t been exposed before. (I feel the same way when someone isn’t sure how to pronounce the title of an opera in a language they don’t already speak, when someone is looking at piece of art without context for what they ‘should’ be seeing, or when someone is preparing to see Shakespeare for the first time.) I just know in that moment it’s my job to help them not feel foolish for fumbling over the pronunciation, give them credit for trying, and give them a pithy answer to help move things along. And keeping those pithy answers varied so I don’t get bored sharing them is enough to force a high level of creativity into any given week! But that silent G also means I get to carry around a little piece of my heritage every day - a reminder that, no, my name didn’t get changed on Ellis Island, because by the time my father immigrated to this country, Ellis Island was closed for business. And that silent G makes me deeply proud to be only a second generation American.
So, even if you can’t hear it right away, yes, my silent G has definitely shaped me - I hope, for the better.
And I have a feeling that a lot of people have silent G’s of their own too. Just because they aren’t as obvious as mine doesn’t mean that they haven’t had just a profound an impact.
So, I ask you: what is your silent G?
Photo above is of Bad Reichenhall Germany, the little town in Bavaria where my ancestors clung to that GF for centuries while it trickled away from the rest of the German language.