“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.
(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.
Overdressed & Underappreciated 