Tag: cr2

“I’m sure my German teacher is very proud right now!” – The German of Episode 8

[Episode 7] [The entire series]

There was finally a lot more German in this episode again! Or attempts
at German by people who weren’t thanking any teachers. Either or, I’ll take it!

So first off, Liam used the words Danke, Schwester, and Geburtstag. They
mean thanks, sister, and birthday. Thank you, or a more polite version, would
be Dankeschön. Thank you very much would be Vielen Dank. There’s other ways to
say it, but those are enough to get by. And even though it’s finally a
reasonably long word, Geburtstag just literally means day of birth.

Nott then gave us her best guess on what a clock would be called in
Zinnian. Caleb seemed unfamiliar with the concept, maybe because Liam forgot
about Percy spending his later years building a clock tower, much like he
forgot that Percy offered Vax a solution for the smelly armor way back in episode
58. Be that as it may, the German word for clock is Uhr. It’s actually shorter!
Watch, or more accurately wristwatch, would be Armbanduhr. Clock in a bracelet.
And while they tick in German, too, it is nothing like clocken ticken. Though
ticken is the word to tick.

Now for some fun plurals! For the syphilis shenanigans, Liam translated
friends as Freunds. Freund is in indeed the word for friends, but the plural is
Freunde. Freundin (sing.) and Freundinnen (plur.) if they’re all exclusively
female. Another one for the swear jar was when he said Arschloch again – and then
tried to plural it up with an s. There are a few German words that work like that,
but most German words add an -e or -en to build the plural. There’s a bunch of
different ways for different words. Anyways, the plural for Arschloch would be
Arschlöcher – it has an Umlaut AND a different kind of “ch”! Arschloch has the throaty
phlegm sound from hell, Arschlöcher has the hissy y-sound.

Man, I never would have thought this would come up so much. Also, kudos
to Liam for getting the sound right when he said Arschloch! I’m actually kinda
sure his German teacher would be very proud.

Other tidbits: Liam also demonstrated how to count to three correctly –
eins, zwei, drei – after getting a few numbers wrong last time. I didn’t pounce
on that because LITERALLY EVERYONE ELSE already had. And occasionally it was hard
to tell whether he was saying good or gut, which mean the same, but the u-sound
in the German word gut is closer to the oo in mood. The t at the end is
somewhat soft, but not a d.

Almost done! Towards the end, Taliesin brought up German Christmas Markets,
which apparently have made it to the US now. I knew people went crazy over them
in the UK, but this was news to me. Basically, for the entire month of December
and sometimes way earlier to way later, most German centers of town, usually
the area around big plazas or close to train stations, turn into a jungle of
tiny wooden huts selling lots of Kitsch, Killefit and Tüdelkram (three somewhat
regional words for knick-knacks), sweets, the German equivalent of food truck
food, and yes, unholy amounts of mulled wine. My current town has like five of
those all close to my university and is it’s the only somewhat sizeable town in
the area, so it is FLOODED by drunk people by 11 AM in the morning for the entirety
of December. Not fun.

(Personally, I prefer cocoa with amaretto in it. Fun fact: I drank an
entire liter of that from one of these giant-ass Bavarian beer glasses during
the Vecna fight.)

And last but most certainly not least, due to the festive occasion,
allow me to demonstrate the directness of the German language in a timely
manner: The German word for baby is Säugling. It literally means little person
that nurses. It uses the same word as Säugetier, which is the word for mammals.
Very descriptive, but not very pretty at all, which is why most people just say
Baby nowadays. In addition, the actual act of breastfeeding is called stillen.
Which basically means to silence, and while I’m sure there’s some deeper meaning
or origin behind this word, like, most of the time you do indeed do this so the
baby will shut up, so yay, descriptive and to the point again!

Aaaand that’s it for this episode. If I missed anything or got something
seriously grossly wrong, feel free to point that out.

PS: Liam’s German teacher was apparently called Mr. di Angelo. I’m gonna
use this to tell you all to check out the Percy Jackson series and the follow
ups by Rick Riordan. Amazing books all of them, and one of the most amazing
characters in it has the same last name!

agnesgoesadventuring:

princessamericachavez:

You know that ‘one fear’ meme? My fear is Jester will be demonized or pushed away by the fandom if she seems to be ‘getting in the way’ of the other ships involving Fjord. Because you know fandom has a tendency to treat female characters like shit in this kind of situations…

I know more than a few people have expressed this concern, and considering the fact that something very similar happened with Keyleth in the first campaign, I would say it’s a valid concern to have. Also, this happens a lot in general when it comes to m/m ships and female characters. Female characters are often demonized or ignored because it’s perceived the pose a threat to the ship because of the potential/reality of their canon relationship with the male characters. It happened with Molly and Mary on Sherlock, it’s happened a bit with Laura on American Gods, I remember Kate getting some stuff like that on Lost, I know female love interests on Supernatural have taken a lot of crap. 

In other words, we’re gonna go full anime fandom if this keeps up. I thought I had escaped this hell.

To weigh in on Nott’s actions vs “broomgate”

fkcoffee:

out-there-on-the-maroon:

dezenraghav:

I love Laura Bailey. I have the *harp music* extension. I think her presence as an internet famous girl gamer is so goddamn important and I’ve been lucky to have girls half as cool as her sit at my table, and I hope to god I get to play with more since this amazing hobby should be open to everyone and anyone.

However, I don’t think what Vex did felt “good.”

It felt like Vex stole the broom for her own uses. Nott is a goblin and has been shown to not understand societal norms of human+ society.

Shakaste essentially tells Nott that what she did was ok this time.

Nott stole for Caleb, who was likely one of the first people to treat her as more than “just a goblin” and her only real friend before joining the group. There’s a different of morality here and everything needs to be looked at in context. 

“an internet famous girl gamer”

“lucky to have girls”

Laura Bailey is 36 years old. She’s a grown woman.

It’s kind of suspicious to go on a whole tangent over how much you love and respect “girl gamers” before talking about character actions, as if those two things are even remotely related. Why is Laura Bailey being a woman at all relevant to the morality behind stealing?

Besides, you seem to be completely disregarding Vex’s background for your shaky-at-best analysis. Nott and Vex have pretty similar backgrounds of growing up from poverty and shitty conditions, and both have a significant person in their life that mutually take care of each other. They both frequently steal for themselves and for the sake of their companion. One stole ALL of another character’s money, and the other stole a powerful magical item. It’s a reach to imply one was somehow more moral than the other.

Let me pile onto this saying Nott’s first instinct was to check whether the blind old man cleric helping them save people had stuff on him she could steal. Anything at all. And even though she might have come from poverty, with the additional gnoll ears and all that, it’s not like they’re particulary hurting for cash right now.

Vex stole the broom specifically, and because she wanted it to fly. She stole nothing else, tried to give Gern dragon scales as some form of exchange, had previous experience with how useful flight is in combat, especially at that point when they were going up against dragons. And came right off an arc dealing with evil necromancers.

I mean. Not trying to really make a judgement here, just stating facts. Also yes, calling a 36 year old woman a gamer girl is shady at best, and bringing up that fact at all when you’re trying to argue the morality of stealing in a D&D game is… Suspicious.

“We have four jokes in this campaign!” – The German of Episode 7

(Though they didn’t even roll that many nines this time around. Is the curse broken?)

[Episode 6] [Episode 5]

Again, not
a lot of German going on this episode! I think I heard Liam utter exactly three words of German this time, “Verdammt”,
“Entschuldigung” and “Acht.” Now “acht” is the German word for eight. If you’ve
followed along these posts, you might have seen my previous attempts to explain
“ch” sounds, and this one is another one of the throaty coughing noise from
hell that non-natives have trouble with. But Liam tried! That’s great!

“Entschuldigung”
means sorry, I’m sorry, or excuse me. Sometimes abbreviated to “’tschuldigung”
because it is a bit of a mouthful. For that same reason, many Germans,
especially younger ones, just say sorry at this point. With our dry, throaty r-sounds
that to this day have made it impossible for me to properly roll an r in any
language.

In a
previous episode, Sam tried saying the same, but said “entschuldigen” which is
actually also a real German word. It’s the infinitive of the verb to apologize.
Actually, had he said “Sie” after that, he’d have properly asked for forgiveness,
even. And politely at that.

Verdammt
means damn. Or damned, literally, but it is used like damn. Add that one to
your list of German curses! But since it’s an adjective, there’s declinations
happening when you use it to describe something and not just as a one-word
expletive. Not gonna go into that can of worms, though. Oh boy.

Shakäste might
be a good opportunity to talk about Umlaute (not Ümläuts, people), the funny
letters with dots on top of them which make a U look like a smiley face – Ü.
But these are a thing in a bunch of languages, and that particular name was
very clearly not inspired by anything German, and consequentially, the ä wasn’t
pronounced like it would be in German. Which is basically like you all pronounce
your regular a. Like in Vax.

And I’m
gonna close this out with a German joke or pun or whatever you’d like to call
it, that is totally educational, too! If… You remember all the German words I’m
gonna throw at you now.

So in the
beginning, I think Sam called the columns they saw stalactites, which made me
recall how my grandfather taught me how to differentiate between stalactites
and stalagmites.

So the
German words are Stalagmiten and Stalaktiten. Wow, I have never seen these
written out before and was about to make a joke about how it’s weird to have a
g for one and a c for the other, but hey, we do that, too. Okay, anyway.

The -miten of Stalagmites is pronounced like
the German word for rents (Mieten). And the rents are going up. Now more than
ever, but apparently already a thing 16 years ago. After that, the other
present family members hushed my grandfather, and me, being a wee little thing
of 8 years with little to no knowledge of the world or anything, took a few
years to figure out why.

The -titen
part of the other ones isn’t exactly pronounced like the German word for tits
(Titten), but close enough, apparently. And, well, tits sag. It appears my
family tried to shelter me from this realization, though I have no idea why. Or
maybe they didn’t want to hear their otherwise rather dignified and proper
father say the word tits at the dinner table. Or wanted to spare my grandmother
from having to hear it. Anyways!

With this
nifty German trick (we call them Eselsbrücke!), you too can remember that stalagmites
are the things rising up from the ground (like rents), and stalactites are
coming down from the ceiling (kind of like boobs, if you squint)! This… has
been a PSA? I guess?

PS: The real fun starts when you notice that the Dutch word for rents is “huren” which is the German word for whores. Makes for a fun experience when you’re in some fancy church in Amsterdam and notice that all the pews are whored out.

tricksterclericsarebombdiddly:

youngbloodbuzz:

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..

Between this, the syphilis joke, and the lots of dicks Jester isn’t afraid of, someone else had that idea last week too.

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.)

Our Elves come in Elevens – The German of Episode 6

“We all learned something!”

[Episode 5] [Episode 4]

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.

(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.

probablydeletethis:

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.