Main Entry: ep·onym
Pronunciation: ‘e-p&-”nim
Function: noun
Etymology: Greek epOnymos, from epOnymos eponymous, from epi- + onyma name — more at NAME
1 : one for whom or which something is or is believed to be named

http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/eponym

As many of you probably know, I’m a long-time Usenet junkie participant, these days spending far too much time reading and posting, especially to alt.usage.english. Back around 1991, when AUE was just getting started, I was active there and in sci.lang, and one of the constant frustrations was that it was hard to discuss pronunciation in a textual medium. British writers would use “er” as a “transparent” way of describing the sound in “cut”. Misundersandings would arise when people talked about “the vowel in ‘caught’” when it turned out that they pronounced “caught” and “cot” identically. And people would write things like “rhymes with ‘marry’” without realizing that that would mean different things to different people.

Linguists, of course, had long ago solved this problem, designing the International Phonetic Alphabet, which allowed pronunciation to be precisely and (reasonably) unambiguously specified. Unfortunately, it made use of a large number of characters that couldn’t be typed in an ASCII medium like Usenet. Luckily, there was a movement underway to create a new character set, Unicode, which would be large enough to easily include all of the IPA characters—but it was clearly going to be a long time before it would be possible to assume that every newsgroup participant would be able to easily read and write it. (Indeed, we’re still quite a ways away.)

In 1987, a method for transcribing phonetic symbols needed for English was posted to sci.lang by Joshua Samuel Honig Guenter II of Reed College. It became something of a de facto standard on sci.lang, but it didn’t cover all of the IPA symbols needed, especially for discussions of languages other than English. In August, 1992, I put together a rough draft of a scheme that would allow people to write any IPA character using just ASCII characters, in a way that would, hopefully be readable and easy to remember, and posted it to AUE and sci.lang with a request for comments and assistance in turning it into something really usable. Over the next several months many people put in their two cents, and out of the discussions we hammered out an actual specification, which I wrote up as a “standard” document called “Representing IPA Phonetics in ASCII”. The scheme was a big success and quickly became the de facto standard on AUE and sci.lang as well as on other newsgroups and was later used in other software systems. (For example, it came to light years later that the implementers of the Lynx web browser chose to use it to represent IPA characters.)

So what does this have to do with eponyms? Well a year or so ago, I was Googling my name (doesn’t everybody do that?) and discovered that there was a Wikipedia entry for “Kirshenbaum” describing the IPA transcription we used on AUE. Googling further, I discovered that “Kirshenbaum notation” appeared to have become the common name for what we, in the groups I frequented, simply called “ASCII-IPA”. This was, to put it mildly, somewhat bizarre. I had never called it “Kirshenbaum notation”. I had never seen anybody call it “Kirshenbaum notation”. But somehow, because it was my name on the document (and, probably also because I hosted the document to give it a permanent place for people to link to), it had become “my” notation in the minds of people who needed to have a name to use to distinguish it from other, similar schemes that had arisen since it was created.

At first, I was appalled. Over the years I had made sure that any time anybody referred to it as “Evan Kirshenbaum’s ASCII-IPA” I would point out that it was a group effort, and that I was simply the coordinator and instigator. And now it appeared that in the wider world I had been handed sole credit for it. Luckily, by the time I came across the entry, someone had changed it so that rather than being credited as the “creator”, I was now the person “who led the collaboration that created it.” I finally decided that it wasn’t worth my time to wage a campaign to get the name changed—and to what? If “Kirshenbaum notation” was what people had decided to call it, it might as well stay that way.

A couple of weeks ago, I got e-mail from someone asking whether it would “insult [my] ego or assuage [my] modesty” if the entry were renamed to simply “ASCII-IPA”. Googling, I found that there were almost ten thousand web pages that mentioned both my name and the name of another common transcription scheme. Clearly, if people were going to turn to an encyclopedia to learn about it, “Kirshenbaum” would have been the name that sent them there. I had to respond that, much as it would assuage my modesty, the genie was out of the bottle. But I did resolve to edit the entry to add a bit more information about the history of the effort.

So now I have to wonder: Is this how Turing felt about Turing machines? How Richter felt about the Richter scale? Somewhat embarassed, but a bit flattered? But not able to actually use the term themselves? Oh, well. At least, if people had to attach my name to something, it was something whose design I could be reasonably proud of, even if it wasn’t anything earth-shatteringly brilliant.

But I’ve regretted not being able to share the information with family members who were interested in genealogy. Recently, I came across a new web genealogy pagckage that allows me to require people to register for an account before getting access. So the family tree is now back on-line! (Without that person’s information, of course. I don’t need the hassle.) Feel free to register for an account—just let me know who you are. But please, please, please note that some of the information is flagged as being PRIVATE or CONFIDENTIAL. This information, especially, should not wind up generally available on the web, as people have specifically requested that it not.

In addition to the information, I also have pictures, census images, ships manifests, ketubahs, and other documents that I’ll be adding as soon as I figure out how.

All that is changing. The first change is that there is a new family treesection up. (See this post for details.) This new site requires users to register for accounts, and so should keep personal information from just being “out there”.

The second change is that I’ve installed blogging software to make it more straightforward to add news updates like this. No, I don’t think that this is going to become a daily blog (but you never know)—too much of my time is already taken up by the alt.usage.english newsgroup—but it will make it easier to keep people apprised of actual family news and web site news.

I’ve also substituted a more recent picture on the main page and brought the links up to date.

The next change (hopefully) will be that our photo album will be brought up to date. I’ve got new software for that, and we’re in the process of organizing things. Finally, I’ll be bringing our personal pages up to date.
Stay tuned.