Talk:Trump (surname)

Scholarly source for Drumpf

Not that I have any reason to doubt Boston Globe or John Oliver, but is there a more subject-relevant source for the Drumpf claim? Such as a book on German surnames, a journal, or even a textbook dealing with the time period. Lizard (talk) 02:38, 14 September 2016 (UTC)

I am interested in this too. I realise the notability of Drumpf was mostly due to its propagandistic and fun value in the campaign, but now that this is over, I was trying to find out about its source. Oliver clearly just took it from Blair (2001), who (p. 11) already spent a paragraph musing about its "onomatomancy" just like Oliver did.

"'Trump' is a wonderful word, a marvelous name. A name Dickens would surely have given to a prominent character if only he had thought of it, 'Trump' evokes trump card, trump hand, trump suit -- all terms associated with winning. Whether Donald Trump could have had the same success with any other name is an intriguing question. How fortunate that 'Drumpf',' the unresonant original version, evolved over the centuries to the current orthography."

But precisely this rhetorical exercise makes me doubt the soundness of the derivation. (btw. I disagree with the author's comments on Dickens, because in Dickens' time the word would still have had stronger connotations connected to trump "to deceive, cheat", trumpery "deception" etc. which seem to be mostly absent in current English).

Frederick Trump was descended from a winegrower called Trump in the late 17th century, via a long line of winegrowers, apparently his family even inherited the vineyard. But the connection to one "itinerant lawyer" called Hanns Drumpf recorded in Kallstadt in 1608 is only alluded to. Blair makes a point of discussing the chaos of the Thirty Years' War and how Kallstadt was all but wiped out in the 1640s. Apparently all we know is that there was a guy called Drumpf in Kallstadt in 1608, and then there was another guy called Trump in Kallstadt in 1690, there does not seem to be anything to connect them beyond the mere similarity in their surnames.

The German surname Trump is from Bavaria, and it derives from a word for "drum". The MHG word for "drum" afaict is never spelled in -pf, because it had a "soft" ending (trumpe, trumbe, drumbe, drumbel etc.) Drumpf cannot be the same surname. In fact, a surname Drumpf would actually have to be derived from the word for "trump" (in playing cards) (drumb, drump, drumpf, trumpf).

Of course I cannot exclude the possibility that the "itinerant lawyer" changed his name from Drumpf "trump" to Trump "drum" on a whim, but it does not seem to be the same name and we do not seem to have any positive evidence that this is what happened. This Guardian article (29 January, a month older than Oliver's segment), where the journalist goes to Kallstadt to research the family's history, cites the forms Drumb, Tromb, Tromp, Trum, Trumpff, Dromb as spelling variants from the town register. The form Drumpf is conspiciously absent from the article (but note Trumpff). --dab (𒁳) 10:38, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

Misstatements in genealogy section?

I thought trump's grandfather Frederick's last name was originally Drumpf. If so, wouldn't his earlier direct ancestors in Germany also be named Drumpf? Yet the Genealogy section lists them as being named Trump.50.203.182.230 (talk) 03:05, 4 June 2020 (UTC)