It will never stop being weird to me that you anglos just translate his first name to Frederick / Fred instead of going with Friedrich / Fritz, it's as if i was calling Biden and Stalin "Jupp" because that's the traditional short form for Joseph in the Rhineland.
Wait i've actually called Stalin Jupp in the past nvm
Edit: RIP my inbox lol
these replies are actually really informative
Engels translated his own name as Fred actually
We have evidence of this as early as the 1838-9 letters to his sister Marie (Engels was in the habit of using random bits of English even in his earliest letters).
And it becomes more prominent ofc once he moves to England and lives there. Marx himself used 'Fred' to refer to Engels often, including in this Dec. 6 1868 letter
Show
Afaik this is the transcription of the original letter rather than a translation (it can be found in MEWBand32). I'm not a German speaker, but my guess would be that any weirdness is a combination of:
-
it being 19th century German;
-
it might have traits of 19th century Rhineland dialect;
-
it uses random English;
-
it's a speedily written letter so may have errors
Marx tends to use random English, French, Latin, Greek, Italian, etc words and grammar in his personal writings along with his own contractions in German, and just words he's made up
-
Honestly, here in Poland we use polonized names for the theorists and they were also polonized historically. Karol Marks, Fryderyk Engels, Włodzimierz Lenin, Józef Stalin and so on.
Including even some soviet politicians and more people presumably, but most just have their names phoneticized for polish speakers. If a guy is of a Polish origin, it's guaranteed their name will be written fully in Polish. Like Feliks Dzierżyński and Róża Luksemburg for example.
Really? I've regularly seen English translations on here where he's called that.
actually reading source material? on my hexbear??
(online I've also only seem Friedrich but I may have seen Frederick once or twice in print, I read books but not a lot of marx/engels lately)
Dear Fred, please send me 25 bucks, I have received a credible tip on a new alt-coin that Lafargue has invested in.
It honestly seems insane to me that £3 then equals £418 now. But apparently the farthing was 1/960 of a pound so it's not like they were too limited on dividing it. I guess it's easier to think of the penny (or maybe the shilling?) as their "base unit" the same we way might consider the pound or dollar as the base.
But then I look at US inflation (where by that point the penny was the lowest denomination) and it looks $3 then is about $65 today so there's a huge gap there. I can't find what the exchange rate was at the time though.
The UK government deliberately devalued the pound a couple of times, we had the great depression significantly devalue the pound, and the 70s&80s were sustained periods of high inflation.
But then I look at US inflation
Bretton-Woods and some shenanigans with the UKs war debt devalued it significantly against the dollar multiple times.
i mean if i was the son of some rich industrialist i would pay my friend's rent too tbh, but i wonder if the terse writing is just how they wrote or if it is karl marx hiding feelings of inadequacy or something, its hard to ask others for money even if you know they would give it, especially for a cis man in a very patriarchal time. especially hard to ask outside of the immediate family as well. it might have been weirder for engels if marx opened with some kind of softener line or sob story right? idk how their relationship was though. dudes are weird sometimes.
I can imagine writing like that if invited to do so. If he doesn't want to hear a sob story because he's busy or indifferent, then cutting to the chase makes it easier to read. It could be indicative of feelings of inadequacy, but I wouldn't conclude that based on a bare bones note.
Might also be more appropriate like this if Engels is going to open it and hand it to a secretary or something to sort out.
i wonder if the terse writing is just how they wrote or if it is karl marx hiding feelings of inadequacy or something
I little bit of Column A and Column B
£3 in 1868 would be equivalent to £280 today. My rent alone is triple that.
Mao was right.
I love it when reactionaries think it's a big own to dunk on Marx. Like commies don't do it too.
lmao imagine receiving a letter signed "yours, K. M." from Karl Marx because he was just a guy back then
his name is Joey Steel and don't you fuckin forget that 
