[WikiEN-l] Adolph Hitler

daniwo59 at aol.com daniwo59 at aol.com
Thu Nov 13 08:47:46 UTC 2003


The question is, whether it is an alternative spelling or simply a 
misspelling of a name, and is google the place to determine whether something is an 
alternative spelling. For instance, there are sites that refer to William 
Shakespear, even though the contemporary conventional form is Shakespeare. 

As for Adolf/Adolf Hitler, there are two reason that it would be spelled with 
ph--1) the person spelling it is using the English, rather than the German, 
version of the name, though I can't really see a justification for this: we 
write Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, not John Wolfgang, and Konrad Adenauer, not 
Conrad (although admittedly, there are some instances where the English variant 
of a name is commonplace, i.e., William Tell); 2) the more likely, that the 
person either didn't know or made a mistake. I don't think we need to record 
misspellings, otherwise we can get stuck up with every variant typo, incl. Jospeh 
Goebbels. 

Danny 
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