“We all learned something!”
So this episode had very little German in it. First,
of course, the title joke. It’s come up in another episode when Caleb rolled an
11, but the German word for 11 is elf. Elf, capitalized, is also the name for,
well, an elf. Plural is Elfen. Unless we’re talking Lord of the Rings elves,
those are called Elben. I did a little research on this, and apparently
Tolkien, being the language nerd that he was, picked the German term himself to
differentiate his elves from cutesy little fairy thingies like in Shakespeare,
and while the English language wouldn’t let him do that to his satisfaction, the German language
had a mythos of Alben, which are a little more regal and dignified than your
standard pixie.(At least that’s what I’ve found out from digging
through a lot of forum posts of nerds yelling at each other in the early 2000s.
There’s been a LOT of discourse, apparently.)Fun fact: The German word for nightmare is Albtraum, a
bad dream caused by these Alben. At least until our Merriam Webster or Oxford dictionary equivalent,
the Duden, also allowed the spelling of Alptraum, because for some reason many
people associate bad dreams with the alps or something.Another thing Caleb said at one point was “richtig”.
That means right or correct. Now, recall for a moment the horrible recording I
did of German “ch” sounds the first time around. The thing is, we have two
different ones, and both are very tricky for English native speakers.After a, o, and u, it’s a Spanish-esque “j” sound, a
little like you’re trying to cough up phlegm at the back of your throat.After e and i, and also ei, the “ch” is pronounced
like a hissy “y” sound. Y as in yes.Now when English speakers try to do this, it turns into
either a k sound of a sh sound. When they talked about a family called the
Baumbachs while still at Trostenwald, Matt did the k sound. When saying “richtig”,
Liam used the sh sound.Now before I get too high and mighty with my accurate pronunciation guides and everything,
I should say that these “ch” sounds are only reeeaaaally a thing in high or
standard German, which is only “natively” spoken in the north- to mid-west of
Germany. Which is where I’m from! But go anywhere south or east from there, and
many of the soft “chs” actually become “shs”. So depending on whether you had a
native German teacher from any of those parts, you might hear it differently in
class, just as Liam might have.And lastly, at least from what I’ve caught this time,
Liam’s old time favorite, “Scheiße”. It means shit. It’s just as versatile a
curse in German. Now funny thing, every time Liam has said this (and there have
been a lot of times), he pronounced the funny ß letter like a soft, vocal s.Now, the vocal s is a thing in German, don’t get me wrong.
Basically every time you see a single “s” in a word, it’s a vocal one. If you
see a double “ss”, it’s the hissy one like it also exists in English. Also,
single s (or any consonant, for that matter) means the vowel before that is
long, while a double ss (or any other consonant) means a short vowel.So what’s the ß do? Well, technically it’s there for a
hissy s after a long vowel, so in “scheiße”, the s sound in the middle would
actually be a hissy or voiceless or sharp s-sound. At least that’s how it works
now; until a few years ago, ß was used a lot more liberally, but there’s been a
spelling reform semi-recently which weeded out a lot of ß, so now when they’re
there, they actually do serve that purpose. I think. This is also why if you
happen to have older German books, there will be a lot more ß in there, and not
always because of the pronunciation rules I just told you.This has been your living language edition of German
PSAs! Try not to dream of mountains tonight.PS: If I missed anything, feel free to ask about it. I
have twitch prime and immediate access to the newest episode.PPS: Please do yourself and everyone else a favor and
consult a friendly neighborhood German before peppering your fanfiction with
German phrases. There’s a lot of us around. I volunteer as tribute.PPPS: As a general recommendation, watch this interview with Jan Böhmermann, a German… Satirist is probably the most accurate term here, who became notorious for being sued by the Turkish president Erdogan over a disgusting poem. Not only is it a German speaking English in the wild, he also directly makes fun of me for being annoyed by German accents. Well, no, he doesn’t know of my existence, but the general sentiment is there. Also he’s funny.
First off: Thank you for putting this together, adding a German perspective! I may not agree with all your opinions, but that’s fine 🙂
I hope you don’t mind me cutting in to clarify some linguistics stuff that you didn’t get quite right, though.
Your explanation of the two ch sounds is correct: one after a o u (and au!) that’s like the Spanish j, the so-called “Ach sound”; and the “ich sound” in all other positions – that is mostly after e i ei and in the suffix -chen – which is the hissy sound at the beginning of “Hugh” or “huge”, at least in certain accents of English.
Your observation that this ich-sound is not always pronounced as such and therefore Liam’s pronunciation is something you could in fact come across “in the wild” is also correct. The scope of this phenomenon (it’s called “Koronalisierung”) is not nearly as large as you make it seem, though. You can find this pronunciation mostly in areas of Saxony and the mid-Western part or the country (look at the red and yellow dots here), as well as in urban areas where a kind of “new dialect” has evolved under the influence of immigrant languages. It is not at all common in southern Germany.
The other part that’s not exactly accurate is your explanation of the different spellings and pronunciations of s sounds. It’s not entirely wrong, either, but my linguist brain couldn’t let the inaccuracies slide entirely. I’m not going to go into detail here, because it actually gets quite complicated if you take into account all aspects of correspondence (or not…) between sounds and writing, vowel lengths, syllable structure, historical aspect and sound changes and whatnot, and don’t even start me on regional differences…
So, in short: Yes, there are a voiced s (the sound you often write as z in English) and a voiceless s (the hissy s like in “Scanlan” or “Percy”) in German. Yes, written <ß> or <ss> always stand for a voiceless s and <ß> follows after a long vowel (or diphthong) and <ss> after a short vowel – but not all voiceless (or “hissy”) s are written as <ß> or <ss>. Often, a simple <s> stands for a voiced s, and it’s often preceded by a long vowel, but that’s not always the case, as you implied.
So, yeah. Sorry for getting all nit-picky, there are just so many linguistic misconceptions floating around in the world… In the end, getting rid of them is also what you are doing, and I hope it’s okay that I contributed a bit of linguistic accuracy.
PS: Thanks for linking that Böhmermann interview, I really enjoyed that!
Hey, thank you!
I’m doing this nach bestem Wissen und Gewissen – as far as my schoool education can take me! 😀
Can you list examples for the S sounds? I tried to keep it vague because everyone who ever explained this to me just was annoyed by the Rechtschreibreform in the end, but when thinking about it, I didn’t come up with a single word that’s written with a single s where a hissy one is spoken, unless it’s imported from English. Though I think that’s different in some southern region, where words that are usually pronounced with the voiced s suddenly become hissy? In any case, it always seemed to me – from a speaker perspective with no linguistic education – that the s/ss/ß rules as I explained them are the rules, and everything deviating from that would be the exceptions. And as I’m trying to do short overview, I want to talk about the Regefall more than the… Ausnahme! Huh. Okay, found my own example there, didn’t I? So does that mean every s before a consonant or at the end of a word is hissy?
Overdressed & Underappreciated 