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.
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.
(Germanic dialects are wild. We technically have a unified common language, but that doesn’t mean everyone actually speaks it that way. There’s entire languages that are technically dialects of the same language standard German sort of derived from that sound closer to what I speak than to what people speak in other parts of Germany, (eg. Saxony), like Dutch or Yiddish.)
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.
A single “s” can also be hissy when it’s at the end of the word or in front of a consonant. Thanks to @doyouhearthefranzising for pointing that out to me.
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.
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.
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?
so are we gonna talk about how jester is clearly the rich trust fund kid who set off on a backpacking roadtrip (with the added bonus of searching for her father)
Am I literally the only one who, when she recognised that ostentatious gnome, thought that ‘hey, maybe her mum has a lot of money because she’s a sex worker’? She’s from a place called the ‘menagerie coast’. Maybe I’m just looking into it too much but damn. It seemed like a big point in that direction..
I’m not entirely sold, yet. Like. The plot thickens, and the image of little Jester wreacking havoc like she does at a brothel is pretty amazing, but after rewatching it, it seems odd to me that a low-level political figure in the middle of the boonies would have travelled all the way across the mountains to the coast to… Visit a brothel? You’d think he could find that closer to home. Then again, it was a few years ago.
Jester also only asked about this after she heard that the gnome was involved with politics. So maybe whatever her mum’s running (and I’m not ruling out brothel yet, mind you) is very deeply into politics or smear money of whatever, which could be… Interesting.
(On the other hand, Jester could have just seen a lot of dicks because she likes to have sex with no payment involved. Or has siblings, or her mom has a bathhouse, or nude bathing is very in at that coast she’s from. Going from that to sex work is… A stretch, I still think. She’s also trained as a healer, another profession in which you see a lot of dicks and, especially in a port town, will heal those dicks of syphilis.)
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.
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.
(Germanic dialects are wild. We technically have a unified common language, but that doesn’t mean everyone actually speaks it that way. There’s entire languages that are technically dialects of the same language standard German sort of derived from that sound closer to what I speak than to what people speak in other parts of Germany, (eg. Saxony), like Dutch or Yiddish.)
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.
A single “s” can also be hissy when it’s at the end of the word or in front of a consonant. Thanks to @doyouhearthefranzising for pointing that out to me.
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.
Everyone wondering if Taliesin is playing a secretly evil Mollymauk is forgetting something.
Who in the part has said they would looove to team up with NPCs like Lady Briarwood? Raishan? Or even play Clarota if he got the chance? Who did play a CE cleric of the Chained Oblivion?
What I’m saying is that y’all are sleeping on the evil potential hiding behind the puppy eyes of Liam O’brien and should it happen, no one will be prepared.
I could seriously see that happening. And then I’ll be over here, disgruntedly rolling my eyes at the evil character with the German accent.
Soooo, is everyone just ignoring the unsubtle hints that Jester’s mom is/was a prostitute and that so was Jester before becoming an adventurer?
Can you spell those hints out a little more? All I can think of is that Jester said she’d seen a lot of dicks and isn’t afraid of them. And that can mean a multitude of things. I took it as her simply having a sexual history with no vibes of prostitution at all. Her mother could have achieved wealth in numerous ways, and disappeared dads in a fantasy settings are also far from an unsubtle hint of the mother being a prostitute.
I’m not even trying to be confrontational of defensive here, I just legitimately want to hear if you have anything more solid I might have missed! I think the idea is intruiguing, at the very least.
Some things are just natural, like running and walking. You could always run, you could always walk, without spending a moment to think about it.
And then someone comes along and asks a simple question: “How do you walk?” And while you’re trying to find an answer, you begin to trip over your own feet, you stumble, and you are forced to stop and stare. Suddenly, you start thinking about things you have always taken for granted, things that never occurred to you. In the twinkling of an eye they are all you can think about, and it’s a mess. You can’t walk in a straight line anymore; you can’t walk without calculating every single step you take. You are needlessly aware of it – and all because of a single, simple, silly question.
So Hunchback is far and away my favorite movie from Disney’s
Renaissance, and it always makes me so happy that yes, people seem to
appreciate it, people seem to love it, but I’mma go into exactly WHY it’s my
favorite, and WHY I think it’s so crucial, and WHY I think it should be
required viewing for young boys specifically.
We all know that a huge bulk of the media we’ve grown up
with consistently has that one frustrating message: Being the hero means you’ll get the
girl. Many boys let this mentality bleed
into reality. We have “nice guys,” who
feel that their niceness entitles them to romance, when obviously that
discredits a female’s personal choice. We
all get this, we all know this, and a lot of us get that it’s a toxic message.
So check out our hero.
He’s an incredibly good person who isn’t conventionally attractive.
Check out our lady.
Super good person, conventionally attractive.
The movie so deliberately builds up Quasi’s hopes. There’s a whole fucking song about it.
But Esmeralda, who is her own person with her own
motivations and preferences, chooses another man, who is also good and also
attractive.
A lot of people criticize this aspect of the movie, the fact
that Quasi doesn’t get the girl BECAUSE of his appearance. But my argument? This is the best damn message a movie could
ever send.
Because when things get dicey, when Esmeralda’s life in in
danger, when Quasi would be putting his own life on the line, he knows that
romance is no longer within the realm of possibility. He knows he won’t be “getting the girl.” He knows this, and he allows himself a moment
of bitterness, he risks falling prey to the “nice guy” trope, and he almost
succumbs.
“She already has her knight in shining armor, and it’s not me.”
BUT THEN HE DOES THE RIGHT THING.
He has NO ulterior motive for saving her life. NO ulterior motive for opposing the man who
raised him. And he doesn’t know that he’ll
get any reward, he knows he could straight up get killed for his actions, and
yet he still acts.
And there’s no bitterness.
There’s still so, so much love between him and Esmeralda, pure awesome
platonic love, and love between him and Phoebus, and just fucking love all
around, it’s amazing.
I’ve heard so many people express distaste at Quasi not
ending up with Esmerelda. Like he was
cheated out of some kind of reward. But
have they watched the ending?
Does that look like a man cheated of his reward? Does he look like he “lost” to Phoebus? No dude, that’s a man who has everything he
ever wanted, and that’s also a man who didn’t “get the girl.”
If that’s not an essential message for young boys to hear, I
don’t know what is.
The writers described HoND as a “Rolling Stones” ending: Quasimodo doesn’t get what he wants (Esmeralda’s love) but he gets what he needs (freedom from his abusive guardian and acceptance by the city in general). And yes, that totally counts as a win for him.
An excellent opposite to this would be the plot to The Phantom Of The Opera (the book) He does not embrace her personal choice.
On a scale from Hunchback of Notre Dame to the Phantom of the Opera, how badly did you handle a lifetime of isolation based on deformity, and losing your crush to a guy who would absolutely place second to you in a singing competition
“Authors can’t use it in fantasy fiction, eh? We’ll see about that…”
–Terry Pratchett, probably
Try to implement anything but a conservative’s sixth grade education level of medieval or Victorian times and you will butt into this. all. the. time.
There was a literaly fad in the 1890′s for nipple rings for all genders(and NO, it was NOT under the mistaken belief that it would help breastfeeding–there’s LOTS of doctors’ writing at the time telling people to STOP and that they thought it would ruin the breast’s ability to breastfeed well, etc). It was straight up because the Victorians were freaks, okay Imagine trying to make a Victorian character with nipple rings. IMAGINE THE ACCUSATIONS OF GROSS HISTORICAL INACCURACY
people just really, REALLY have entrenched ideas of what people in the past were like
tell them the vikings were clean, had a complex democratic legal system, respected women, had freeform rap battles, and had child support payments? theyd call you a liar
tell them that chopsticks became popular in china during the bronze age because street food vendors were all the rage and they wanted to have disposable eating utensils? theyll say youre making that up
tell them native americans had a trade network stretching from canada to peru and built sacred mounds bigger then the pyramids of giza? you are some SJW twisting facts
ancient egypt had circular saws, debt cards, and eye surgery? are you high?
our misconception of medieval peasants being illiterate and living in poverty in one room mud huts being their own creation as part of a century long tax aversion scam? you stole that from the game of thrones reject bin
iron age india had stone telescopes, air conditioning, and the number 0 along with all ‘arabic’ numbers including algebra and calculus? i understand some of those words.
romans had accurate maps detailing vacation travel times along with a star rating for hotels along the way, fast food restaurants, swiss army knives, black soldiers in brittany, traded with china, and that soldiers wrote thank-you notes when their parents sent them underwear in the mail? but they thought the earth was flat!
ancient bronze age mesopotamia had pedantic complaints sent to merchants about crappy goods, comedic performances, and transgender/nobinary representation? what are you smoking?
Overdressed & Underappreciated 