The Teutonic names, whether German, Scandinavian or Flemish, do not, as a rule, seem by any means so unpronounceable as those pertaining to foreigners of Slavonic race.  The Russian, Polish and Bohemian appellations, which occur frequently in some sections of our country, so often begin with the extraordinary combination cz that many Americans, believing that nothing but a convulsive sneeze could meet the necessities of such a case, decline trying to pronounce them at all.  But the difficulties which these Slavonic names apparently offer would, in a great measure, be removed by a uniform system of orthography.  The combination cz, for instance, corresponds to our ch, and the Polish cognomen Czajkowski becomes much less exasperating when spelled, as it would be in English, “Chycovsky.”  The same thing is true, to a great extent, of the Hungarian names, which are not rare in our larger cities.  They, too, would be greatly simplified to us by being spelled according to English rules.  A very frequent combination in Hungarian names, that of sz is really the same as our ss; while s without the z is pronounced sh.  The Hungarian name Szemelenyi under our system of spelling would therefore be “Semelenye,” which is less discouraging.

The foreign names in the United States that really present the most serious difficulties to the native citizen are unquestionably the Welsh.  Some of the obstacles to easy pronunciation may even in their case be removed by adaptation to our orthography; as is shown by the name Hwg ("hog"), which would be spelled by us “Hoog.”  But there are so many sounds in Welsh that are not only unknown, but almost inconceivable to English-speaking people, that the difficulties would still be very far from being overcome.  And some of these peculiar utterances are expressed in Welsh by combinations of the Roman characters which in English stand for familiar and simple sounds; so that an attempt to reduce the two languages to a common system of spelling would not be at all easy.  The combination ll stands in Welsh for a terrific gurgling, gasping sound, which when once heard swiftly puts an end to all the romantic associations that the name of Llewellyn has derived from history and poetry.

But all such foreign—­or, more strictly speaking, un-English—­names, after being in this country a generation or two, become, in a certain sense, “acclimated.”  They undergo a change in pronunciation, in spelling, or in both, which removes, in effect, the difficulties that originally characterized them.  In this way the German names Schneider, Meyer, Kaiser, Kraemer, Schallenberger, Schwarzwaelder, and a host of others have become, respectively, Snyder, Myers, Keyser, Creamer, Shellabarger, Swartswelder, etc.  Sometimes, too, an American name more or less similar in sound or meaning has been taken or given in place of the original German title; as when Loewenstein ("Lion-rock”) was exchanged for Livingston, and Albrecht ("Albert”) for Allbright.