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I've often wondered about this. In Grove 5th edition there's no explanation in Wilhelmj's own article, but on the same page is an article on (Johan) Tobias (Jacob) Wilhelmi (1885-1944), which starts out: Swedish violinist and composer of Dutch origin, a relative of August Wilhelmj. At that point there's a footnote, which reads: Whose abnormal spelling of the name he did not adopt.
This raises more questions than it answers. Why would Tobias "adopt" August's spelling anyway? Did August assume an odd spelling, different from his original name, when his career took off? And did he expect his relatives to follow suit?
But then I found this, which at least acknowledges the various spelling variants throughout the world-wide family, if not explaining how they arrived or how people unfamiliar with the "Wilhelmj" version would be expected to handle it. -- ♬ Jack of Oz ♬ [your turn]03:02, 24 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
My thoughts were that Germans historically have adopted Classical or Latinate names (e.g. Melanchthon), but J is an I elongated, to differentiate consonant from vowel. If I am going to Latinize my German name, then I am going to change my J to an I, and not the other way around.
I won the high school German contest for Toronto back in the 1970s. Can I think of another case where J is a vowel? No, no way.
When I first saw it, it reminded me of Russian, where a word can end with a palatalization sign, like this, and that softens the preceding consonant.
I dunno; it's just weird.
Occam's Razor would say there was another kid in his class at school named August Wilhelmi.
Does one of the German regional languages allow J as a vowel? Maybe. The Russian sign I mentioned is used as an actual vowel, but in Bulgarian.
