Taverns Before Swine – The German of CR episodes 12 & 13

vohalika:

[Previous episode] [Whole series]

Or actually
just episode 13. Episode 12 had no instances of German words that I recall,
except for in the Twitch commercial break when they introduced this RPG and the
woman presenting kept saying “Gestalt” which is German and means, uh. A person,
a silhouette, that person’s appearance… Lots of things. It was actually used pretty
decently in the game rules, as in, the word fit, but the pronunciation was off.

See, soft “gs” aren’t really a thing in German. They’re pretty much always hard, like in “going”.
The exception is usually words based in French or English. Also, unless it’s at
the end of a word, “st” often becomes “sht”, like “sp” becomes “shp”. I
say often, because that’s no hard and fast rule, there’s several words that
don’t do that. Gestalt does, though. I also happen to play D&D with a few
people from the very south of Germany, and at least one of them speaks a
dialect that did away with the exceptions to the “st” rule and just says “sht”
and “shp” ALL THE TIME.

(It sounds odd if you’re not from the south or other areas that have a general appreciation for the “sh” sound. It’s probably normal if you grew up with it.)

The title
joke is about Lauren Schwein. A word I actually explained in a previous
segment! Like I’m some sort of diviner or something. It means pig. Of course,
the bible quote uses the word Sau, or Säue, the plural, meaning female pigs. Male
pigs are called Eber. Schwein is just a general word for aaaalll of them. It
even has the neuter article and grammatical gender, so it’s das Schwein. For
once, it all makes sense!

And while
we’re at gendered words, Caleb did indeed not call Pumat Sol an asshole. He
said “Herr Sol,” which means Mr. Sol. Today, Herr is used as a general title to
address men, but to be the Herr of someone also means to be the owner, ruler,
or lord. Our equivalent of Ladies & Gentlemen is “Meine Damen und Herren,”
so it has a somewhat polite connotation.

Dame,
however, is not our equivalent for Mrs. or Ms. You might recognize it as an
English word, specifically very British, as in the title the Queen bestows on
women as an equivalent of Sir. Dame Maggie Smith and the like.

That’s not
what it means in German, though. It’s just a very polite word for women. The equivalent
to Mrs. or Ms. would be “Frau” and then the woman’s last name. Frau also
literally means woman. We used to have an equivalent for Miss or Mademoiselle,
too, which was Fräulein, -lein being one of the many diminutive suffixes the
German language has. The grammatical implication of that word being, more literally
than in its international counterparts, that an unmarried woman is smaller,
somehow. Less of a woman. So that hasn’t really survived second wave feminism
way back when.

(It also
just sounds kinda ugly, so I’m glad it’s gone.)

…Unless you
are my mom or any annoyed parent of a girl, then you might call her a Fräulein
in a threatening manner. Or you are my grandmother and still remember the times
when school teachers, especially at elementary schools, were only allowed to be
unmarried women and just addressed as Fräulein in general. Even though you are
also aware that your granddaughter’s elementary school teacher is very much
married, because her husband has been your daughter’s teacher about fifteen
years ago, which you definitely remember because the name is a mouthful.

But that’s
just another of these very specific personal anecdotes.

So that’s
it for what I can remember right now. If I missed anything, feel free to point
it out and I’ll add it in the concise manner in which I communicate
information. If you have any questions or need someone to check the German
Caleb says or moans in your fanfiction, feel also free to hit me up.

“Only I get to say Schiet.” – The German of Episode… Nein

vohalika:

[Episode 8] [The whole series]

So, after
accidentally helping to make Liam happy this week, I somehow got a metric fuck
ton of new followers (okay, 20, but that’s a metric fuck ton for me, okay?), so
I assume this is what you all signed on for. Germanisms! Of which there were very,
very few!

(Not to
mention that this might be the episode with the fewest nines rolled.)

First of
all, because this is becoming a thing, it is spelled N E I N. Not nien. No matter what Taliesin Jaffe tells you. N E I N. Caleb had it right last
episode. Please. Please stop misspelling it. N E I N.

Caleb also attempted to communicate with Beau, asking her “Alles gut?” which means, literally, all well?, and is basically used to ask if everything’s okay.

Moving on.
Unrelated to this episode, during the last episode of Talks Machina, Sam told
us all that he looked up the German word for mighty, and then tired to pronounce
“mächtig”. It got very creative. Something like Mishtish was the result, I
think? For the record, the correct pronunciation is ma (as in many) – hissy y
sound – tig. Some accents do the hissy y sound for gs at the end, too. Or just
turn it all into shs. Some accents do that.

Next on my
list, again nothing that Liam said, but unless I heard wrong, Matt named
something

Weinsteiger.
Wein means wine and Steiger means… Well. Steigen means to rise. Besteigen means
to climb something. A Steiger, without something before that, was a foreman in
a coal mine. Carrying a light. In his hand.

I will now
introduce you to the hymn of my home region, as sung before a soccer game of
the club of my hometown. It’s called the Steiger Song, literally. It’s a coal
miner’s song. I’m from an area in Germany that was, like, THE industrial center
and full of coal mines until the entire thing broke down in the 70ies-80ies and
has been dying a slow death since. Though at least no one has tried to get us
back into business with “clean coal” yet.

I’m sorry. Germans are not patriotic in the regular sense, but if we are attached
to anything, it’s to our soccer clubs, and even though I don’t give a shit
about soccer outside of world cups, that’s still a little piece of home for me.

Here’s a more official version. Also, if you want to giggle, it’s a choir of old men singing, with a straight face, that they’re covering their asses with leather and get drunk on Schnaps. Culture!

(I might
have misheard the name. Wine is a thing in Germany, too, but quite bit south
from where I’m from. Also, there’s a German soccer player called Sebastian
Schweinsteiger (though he might have retired? I only care during world cups),
with Schwein meaning pig. Draw your own conclusions as to the origins of that
last name.)

Speaking of
names and things that make me feel weirdly nostalgic, let’s look at the title
quote! Schiet, or Schiete is another word for shit. It’s more broadly used in
the northern regions of Germany, close to the regions where people speak
Plattdeutsch, which is the closest thing to English the German language gets before
it turns into Dutch. Please don’t lynch me for that joke.

Why is it
nostalgic for me? Because my grandmother, who has no northern roots, used to
say it instead of shit. The easily scandalized one from a few episodes ago. We
have continuity now!

“Ie”, by
the way, is pronounced like a long ee sound in your language. Like in beer. Another
reason you shouldn’t spell it as nien.

And that’s
it for episode NEIN!

PS: For a more concise and straight-forward vocabulary list, go here! @tj-teejay started compiling the various things and phrases being said in order to make life easier for the transcribers, and recruited me as a contributor!

PPS: Once upon a time, when the first Hunger Game movie came out, there was a facebook campaign which sorted you into districts based on your location. I got district 7, which I would have been okay with, Joanna is bae, if not for the fact that I could see a literal coal mine from my living room at the time.

PPPS: I have decided to positively lean into the neins. Which is a funny statement. Positively leaning into the no.

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

vohalika:

(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.