I need the correct spelling to the african surname........i think it is pronounc

Question:There is none. Sorry. Even with languages as close as English and German there are a dozen alternate spellings for some surnames. If you go to a language in a family further apart, like Chinese or Arabic or the 27 African major groups, there are two or three dozen.

Us geezers remember when the capital of China was spelled "Peking". Now it is "Beijing". The Chinese always pronounced it the same; it was the way us red-haired people spelled it in our barbarous language that changed.

"Gnu", the wildbeest, is an inhaled click, not "guh-new". I suspect Africans chuckle when they hear us mangle their language, the way Spanish speakers do when they hear us pronounce "La Jolla" as "La Jaw-lah".

Take your best shot, use soundex if you can, and try as many variations as you can think of.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: There is none. Sorry. Even with languages as close as English and German there are a dozen alternate spellings for some surnames. If you go to a language in a family further apart, like Chinese or Arabic or the 27 African major groups, there are two or three dozen.

Us geezers remember when the capital of China was spelled "Peking". Now it is "Beijing". The Chinese always pronounced it the same; it was the way us red-haired people spelled it in our barbarous language that changed.

"Gnu", the wildbeest, is an inhaled click, not "guh-new". I suspect Africans chuckle when they hear us mangle their language, the way Spanish speakers do when they hear us pronounce "La Jolla" as "La Jaw-lah".

Take your best shot, use soundex if you can, and try as many variations as you can think of.

Besides what Ted wrote about variants, most African languages were oral only, there was no written language. So surname spellings were an artifact of European colonization. With the various dialects and accents, when written surnames started to appear, there were of course numerous spellings. With MOST african languages being oral only, the pronunciation of the surname, not the spelling, is most important.

Oh yea, and contrary to some devilishly handsome and witty previous answerer's opinion, I am not a geezer....just chronologically challenged.

I haven't been at this long but have been getting advice from those who have and reading a lot on the www.usgenweb.com site. It has a lot of helpful information on "how to". Try typing in just the first 3 letters on the soundex. Seems when one tries to use the 'exact' anything, nothing comes up.

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