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Comment by sweettea | Hacker News Reader

Already addressed: "While the family spells its last name with a B, the New York Times stylebook spells Hapsburg with a P, which brought no shortage of scolding emails upon publication."

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How can the New Iork Tymes just choose how they spell things? That's messed up.

These idiosyncrasies are amusing but they do have a habit of dominating the conversation. E.g. the New Yorker (I think) uses diaeresis to represent distinct syllables resulting in words like “Cooperate” being decorated.

Or that chap here who insists on using 5 digit years.

But some go missed. My personal favourite is that I prefer to fully close clauses within quotations.

> The President said, “I will never bomb the moon!”.

The same way they just choose to anglicize Владимир Путин and בִּנְיָמִין נְתַנְיָהוּ, although there are certainly a plenty of much better examples.

The Habsburg Family never used a different writing system, though.

But I bet they used the metric system!

Probably, but only since the 19th century ;)

They did use a different language with different pronunciation rules, though. I'm not convinced that sticking with the original spelling is obviously better. Bibis’s first name certainly doesn't accurately transliterate to Benjamin, and that's probably fine.

They use the name "Habsburg". Who is the NYT to tell them they are in fact not "Habsburg"?

I don't think the NYT is telling them that.

Like the way the French and English write "Cologne" for the city Germans call "Köln". The NYT is just adhering to a different standard, not making up anything new.

Addressed, but not fixed.

It's not at all unusual for English-language press to anglicize names.

But it's not any more anglicized than Habsburg would be. I mean, English does have a letter B, doesn't it? And as far as I know, the difference between B and P is the same as in German.

The first "B" in "Habsburg" is pronounced rather more like the letter "P" than the letter "B".

Not where I live (which is near Habsburg). I would pronounce it the same as the B in -burg. Where are you from (if you care to answer, no problem if not)

That's interesting, I'm not originally German but went to school in Berlin since I was 7 and always heard it pronounced as "Haaps-burk".

I'd think this is just because of how final obstruent devoicing works in German, to me it just seems like the obvious natural way to pronounce the word.

Devoicing is more common in northern dialects

https://youtu.be/9-BBgc_uBZQ?t=1m11s

Seems to be there tho just very subtle

EDIT: it's why GP is not "steffi1977" XD

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