Letter-exchange¶
buchstabwechsel · letter · validated
A personal name whose letters are all rearranged into other words, with the breath-sound h freely inserted or omitted between source and candidate. Not an anagram: anagram requires every letter, including h, to match exactly, which a genuine Wechselschluß need not.
Provenance¶
- Source: Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Deliciae Physico-Mathematicae (Erquickstunden), part two, Nürnberg 1651, XIV. Theil, die IV. Aufgabe, pp. 513-515
- Attribution:
primary— a named author, work and year this catalogue stands behind - Checkability:
source— decidable against the source text it was made from - Attested:
author-stated— the originator set this rule down
Details¶
- Kind: both
- Languages: de
- Requires:
tokens,fold_diacritics - Deterministic: yes
- Also known as: Letterwechsel
- In other languages: Buchstabwechsel (de), Échange de lettres (fr)
Notes¶
Harsdörffer's own synonym is Letterwechsel ("Das Wort Letter für Buchstab / wird in den alten Gedichten hin und wider gefunden", p. 513). Two further rules from the same passage (p. 514) are recorded here, stated but not enforced, because neither is decidable from the checked text alone. Rule I: "Erstlich sollen die Teutschen Namen mit teutschen Endungen den Buchstabwechsel schliessen / wie auch die Lateinischen Namen ihre Endungen behalten: als Johann / Georg. Im Lateinischen Johannes, Georgius etc." — an ending keyed to the name's own language, German or Latin, which this row does not check. Rule III: "Soll der Wechselschluß eine gantze / oder zum wenigsten halbe Meinung geben / welcher das beygesetzte Bild einen vollkommenen Sinn bringet" — the result should give a whole or at least a half sense, completed by an accompanying emblem; whether it does is a judgement no program makes, the same candour antigram's own definition states for opposition of sense. The physical procedure (p. 514) is working method, not an output criterion, and is recorded rather than checked: letters written on paper slips, or on wooden dice because slips "leichtlich verblasen werden" (blow away too easily), with the Stimmer (vowels) separated from the Mitstimmer (consonants) before recombination. Harsdörffer also frames the form as inherently personal — the result "kan keinem gemein seyn als von dessen Namen sie ausgesuchet ist" (can belong to no one but the person whose name it was drawn from) — so source is meant to be a personal name, which this row cannot verify: German capitalises every noun, so capitalisation is no test of namehood. Correction: an earlier draft of this row also claimed that a plain anagram check would wrongly accept a u-for-v or i-for-j swap, and that this was a second, independent reason the row is not a duplicate of anagram. Measured against this codebase, that is false — anagram's fold_diacritics is case-folding plus NFKD combining-mark stripping, which never merged those letters, so anagram already rejects check("anagram", "Uater", lang="de", source="Vater") and check("anagram", "Iohann", lang="de", source="Johann") on its own. The genuine, load-bearing, mutation-tested reason this row exists is the h-exemption alone. The u/i-not-v/j prohibition is still real — Harsdörffer states it, and test_buchstabwechsel.py pins it against a future change to fold_diacritics that might introduce the merge — but it was never a point of difference from anagram, and this note records the correction rather than silently dropping the earlier, wrong claim (the way the llull_figure row records that 504 is the ordered-triple count, not Llull's own).
Prompt hint¶
Rearrange every letter of a personal name into another word or words; you may insert or drop an h anywhere, but never write u for v or i for j.
Parameters¶
| Name | Type | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
fold_diacritics |
boolean | True |
Treat accented letters as their base letter, and ß as ss. |
source |
string | — |
The text this one was made from. |
Examples¶
johann-h-omitted¶
de — this text satisfies the procedure.
Anjon
Parameters: source='Johann'
Source: constructed example on Harsdörffer's own name Johann (Rule I, p. 514: "als Johann"). "Anjon" rearranges Johann's other letters (j, o, a, n, n) and passes over the h entirely — "übergangen", the second half of Rule II's exemption — which a plain anagram check would reject as a missing letter.
iohann-i-for-j-rejected¶
de — this text does not satisfy the procedure.
Iohann
Parameters: source='Johann'
Source: the pinned counterexample from the brief: Iohann is the Latin-alphabet practice of writing I for consonantal J, which Rule II explicitly refuses ("das u und i die Stimmer nicht für v und j setzend"). anagram already rejects this pair too — its fold_diacritics never merged i with j — so this case is not a different verdict from anagram's but Harsdörffer's own rule pinned against a future change to fold_diacritics that might introduce the merge: surplus i, missing j.
buchstabwechsel-harsdoerffer¶
de — this text does not satisfy the procedure.
Diener: Neider.
Dunst: Stunde.
Parameters: fold_diacritics=True, source='Harsdörffer, Letterwechsel'
Source: Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Letterwechsel/Buchstabwechsel; transmitted via Deutsches Textarchiv lemmatised text of Poetischer Trichter, II. Theil (Nürnberg 1648) — NOT verified against Erquickstunden II (1651) pp. 513–515 scan. Rejected: the candidate does not use the source's letters — 7 missing_letter and 4 surplus_letter. Harsdoerffer's Wechselschluss lets the breath-sound h come and go, which this row allows, but not this much divergence.