Talk:Emperor of Austria

The nature of the title
According to the generally reliable Worldstatesmen.org, Austria after 1804 was in German officially dubbed Kaisertum Österreich. Then there's a note: "The word Kaisertum was deliberately chosen not to imply Kaiserreich Österreich (Empire of Austria). The term had no constitutional status before 25 Apr 1848, and had dynastic rather than territorial import: it was intended to encompass all the hereditary possessions of the Haus Österreich, and was so defined in the Constitution of 7 Mar 1849; in the Constitution of 25 Apr 1848 it was similarly used, but excluded the 'Hungarian' and 'Lombardo-Venetian' possessions." This seems to have relevance to some of the thorny issues under consideration in this article. Can anyone with better German than mine help suss out the difference between "Kaisertum" and "Kaiserreich"? --Jfruh 7 July 2005 15:30 (UTC)

Worldstatesmen, as Wik/Gzornenplatz was quite fond of stating before his banning/rebanning from the site, does frequently contain minor errors. As far as I know, this statement is essentially correct. The Kaiserreich/Kaisertum issue has to do with the nature of the word "Reich," which was generally, in 1804, thought to mean "the Holy Roman Empire." Not sure what should be done beyond this. john k 7 July 2005 16:07 (UTC)

Well, I guess my main question would be, what's the literal translation of Kaisertum? In my deeply inadequate German, I'm don't know what the -tum suffix signifies. --Jfruh 7 July 2005 16:22 (UTC)

Well, according to LEO, it's "Empire." But there are lots of words for Empire in German - Reich, Kaiserreich, Kaisertum, Imperium, Empire - and they all have different connotations. Now, the "tum" ending is the normal word used for lesser political entities - a Herzogtum is a duchy (or a dukedom), and a Fürstentum is a principality (or princedom). On the other hand, the word for Kingdom is Königreich. Königtum means kingship, or royalty. So I think a Kaisertum would be kind of like that - an Emperorship, rather than an Empire, although the boundary between the two is rather more fluid than it would be in English, in that Herzogtum means both dukedom and duchy. john k 7 July 2005 17:40 (UTC)

I am a native German speaker and an Austrian. The ending -tum translates to -dom, I suppose. So, Kaisertum would approximately translate to emperordom. I am not aware about any semantic differences between Kaisertum and Kaiserreich. Perhaps the preference of Kaisertum Österreich over Kaiserreich Österreich has just to do with the better sound of the former one. -- Gecek 7 July 2005 18:24 (UTC)

'von' is not used anymore
The article refers to the latest living Habsburgs with 'von' although the use of noble prenouns like that has been forbidden with the end of the monarchy, so their names do not contaiu it. That's wrong in this English version, both in this overview article and in the article of the respective persons. Compare to the german version and you will see there is no 'von' in their name:

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Habsburg-Lothringen

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Zvonimir_Habsburg-Lothringen

and here the law removing noble prenouns: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelsaufhebungsgesetz 2A02:8388:AC1:1080:F54C:679A:820D:C8DE (talk) 21:45, 28 March 2022 (UTC)