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

[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.

mrsmarymorstan

replied to your post “I REALLY Wouldn’t Recommend Zemnian Porn – The German of Episodes 10 &…”

Okay but, very important question from someone
who used to live in Germany… Was Caleb’s treatment of the bread
acceptable or not? If it is one thing I have learnt, it is that bread is
a Big Deal in Germany. *Casually points to beloved giant depressed loaf
of burnt bread*

I AM A FAILURE TO MY PEOPLE! THE BREAD! AAAAH!

Okay so I have never heard of anyone German doing this, but I’m not sure there’s an explicit cultural stigma against it, other than that you don’t play with your food. And sticking your dirty, dirty hands inside of it is WASTEFUL and UNHYGIENIC. But that’s just my take on this and not necessarily “German”.

(The real question is, was it white, grey, or black bread? This is important!)

I REALLY Wouldn’t Recommend Zemnian Porn – The German of Episodes 10 & 11

[Episode NEIN] [Entire series]

(If you don’t understand the joke, I truly envy you. And no, this is the one thing I won’t explain.)

Alright, so
I know I’m really late with this, but in my defense, there was very little
German in the last episodes, so I waited a while to compile it all. Here we go!

At one
point in episode 10, when Caleb has to say a name, he says “Schmidt”. It’s one
of the most common German last names, and literally means Smith. Well, Smith
the last name, not smith the profession. The word for that is Schmied. But it’s
literally the same word, or at least was a few centuries ago before some monk
decided the best way to speak German, the pure accurate way, was the way they
did it around Hanover. Most of the country chose to ignore that until this day.

The most
common surname in Germany is Müller, btw. Literally Miller. Both the name and
the profession.

Caleb also
asked “Was?” for clarification at one point. It means what, plain and simple.

On the last
real, on-set Talks Machina episode, Liam also said there was a lot of “Sturm
und Drang” around the argument between Caleb and Jester. Sturm und Drang is a
literary movement of the 1760ies – 1780ies. German teachers love it and will
make you interpret poems in class from this period a lot. And then you have to
read Goethe or Schiller.

Goethe, by
the way, is probably the only thing that will mean anything to an international
audience. He’s the one who wrote Faust, of Faustian Deal fame. Sell your soul
to the devil fuck a 14 year old after your poisoned her mom. Yes, that is the
basic plot, there’s a reason all you’ve (probably) heard about is the part
about deals with the devil.

(The link is to yet another Jan Böhmermann video. It has no English subtitles, but if you happen to be one of the German critters reading this, or in any way capable of getting a kick out of something in German, treat yourself.)

(Also, Faust was written a liiiiittle too late to reeeaaaally count as Sturm & Drang. But it’s where the author got started.)

I’m being
flippant about this on purpose, of course you can do serious research and all
that on your own if this is too dismissive for you, but in general, Sturm &
Drang was a movement of young, educated men who didn’t like authority and
conventions and had a lot of feelings they wrote poetry and plays about. The
hipsters of their time. Also, isn’t it fun how people literally always stay the
same?

In that regard,
I couldn’t think of a better way to describe fandom discourse. Kudos, Liam,
kudos.

(Sturm
& Drang is also what the school name Durmstrang was based on. I have
thoughts about this entire shebang, but, like… A school in Russia, attended by
Bulgarians, home of wizard Hitler the first, named after a German literary
movement… Riiiight.)

Episode 11
then featured a building which I think had the word “Zauber” in its name, but
everyone insisted on calling it “sauber”. The z in German is pronounced like a
ts. Zauber means spell. As in, to cast a magic spell, which is probably what it
was supposed to mean.

There are a
lot fewer words for magic and magicians in German, by the way. My first
instinct would be to call Caleb’s class Zauberer – the same way wizard was
translated in Harry Potter. However, official D&D books in German call the
wizard a Magier, which is closer to mage, technically. Zauberer is used for sorcerer,
but those terms are pretty synonymous, usually. I’d switch it, personally, but
I too can’t really think of a more appropriate word for the sorcerer class.

Warlock has
been translated as Hexenmeister, by the way. Literally witch master, and close
to the Witcher, at least in language. I don’t take issue with that, but then
again it’s what I’ve been used to since early WoW days, so hey.

Pronouncing
the Z like an S, aka saying “sauber”, turns it into a different word entirely. Sauber
means clean, which, you know, is also appropriate, given that we’re in the
fancy part of town.

And
speaking of fancy parts, there’s also the High Richter. I posted a little PSA
last week to make y’all aware that it most likely supposed to be spelled that
way, not Rickter or Ricter or whatever else you can come up with. Richter means
judge, the profession, which seems accurate – though I’m not entirely sure on
how the Wildemount legal system works. They way they talked to the woman made
her come off as more of a state prosecutor? Or something like an Inquisitor?
The campaign guide did state that the outer parts of the Dwendalian Empire were
inspired by Spain. Albeit 14^th century Spain, which is one century
shy of the actual Spanish Inquisition. The one no one expects. Yes.

And because
this is kind of going to be my job, I can confidently tell you that we don’t
have any appropriate German term for a High Richter. There’s, of course, a
court hierarchy and all that, and you can rise within that hierarchy as a judge,
but your title just becomes judge of this and that court. And the word high is
not included anywhere.

So this is
it for the time being. Depending on the amount of German coming up in, like,
one hour from now, I might write the next post after Easter (which at least my
family soooort of celebrates), or wait until after episode 13.

Until then,
everyone remember: Taliesin Jaffe lied to you. They’re the Mighty Nein. N E I
N. Please. And yes, using a bunch of German automatically means you invite our
pedantic asses over to correct your spelling. Which just about every German I
have met in this community is happy and willing to do! Please consult us if you
plan on including any German in your fanfiction or fanart. None of us will be able to
agree on whether a certain phrase is appropriate to be used during sexytimes,
but at least it’ll be grammatically correct, and isn’t that what REALLY
matters?

“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!

“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.

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.

“We’re losing subscribers in Europe right now.” – The German of episode 5

Because I’m gonna make this a thing, dammit.

Last time, I was a little annoyed with everything, but I don’t know whether it’s growing on me, or whether Liam has toned the accent down. His actual German is still excellent.

Soo, first up, the toilet horse. WC is the abbreviation for water closet, Wasserklosett, which is indeed a rather old-fashioned word for toilet. WC is used more often, but usually only to label the way to bathrooms. When you need to go, you usually don’t go to the WC, but to the Toilette or aufs Klo. Which is derived from Waterklosett! Sometimes, language makes sense.

Then at one point, Caleb said “Halt den Mund” – “shut up,” or, literally, “hold your mouth”. Not as fancy as hold your tongue, but out of the gajillion variations of this, still one of the more polite ways to tell someone to shut up. Others exchange the word Mund with several other things. It can get colorful.

Marisha also mentioned Oktoberfest as an example for why Beau’s pretentious rich people home town might celebrate Winter’s Crest, and then everyone made fun of the international imitations which are only people getting drunk. To be clear, Oktoberfest is not a universal German thing. It’s a Bavarian thing. Bavaria is kind of like our Texas. It’s also where American soldiers were stationed after WWII, and thus the image most Americans have of Germany is heavily influenced by it, much to the chagrin of literally everyone else.

Like, as much as the German accent annoys me, one thing Liam thankfully does well is NOT make it a Bavarian accent. That’s the problem most German accents on English-speaking TV or in movies have, they’re not “German” so much as they’re Bavarian. Or Austrian. Differences there are too nuanced for me to comment on them, but they sound somewhat alike, and nothing like how the rest of us talk.

Okay, and lastly, the real, legit Oktoberfest, the Wies’n, only happen in Munich. And during September because who cares. In Munich, it’s still a lot of tents full of people getting blackout drunk on beer, but there’s also rollercoasters and ferris wheels and other rides like that and confection stands and it’s fun for the whole family if you ignore the blackout drunk people.

Literally anywhere else in Germany, it’s basically the same as US or other international imitations. People get drunk on beer in a tent while wearing clothing no one outside of Bavaria ever wears, and even in Bavaria, it’s not worn during everyday life much, outside of the rural areas. Lederhosen and Dirndl are not traditional clothing anywhere else in Germany. This has been a PSA.

Okay. And now the final thing. The weird tendency for people to roll the number 9, which prompted Liam to make the statement quoted in the title. For those of you not in on the joke, the number 9 in the English language and the word for “no” in the German one sound identical. The spelling is different – nine vs. nein – but they sound the same.

Of course, this has been made famous by both Rammstein (a German metal band that is waaaay more successful abroad than it is around here) and a certain movie in which Hitler shouted it very dramatically. Both of which has become a bit of a meme.

(Tangentially related: Trevor Noah doing stand-up about learning German. Yes, also being African in the US and other stuff, but it all fits together. Treat yourself.)

The joke works backwards, by the way. I vividly remember listening to a story during 7th grade English class which involved someone calling an ambulance and dialing the number 999, which is apparently the British equivalent of 911, causing an entire classroom of German teenagers to start giggling and miss why the person actually called that number. Oh, the German equivalent for that, if you ever find yourself here and in need of emergency services, would be 110 to call the police and 112 to call an ambulance or fire fighters. Yay, another PSA!

If there were any other German-isms in this episode or previous ones that you have questions about, I’m, like, here, and this is something I actually have fun talking about, so feel free to ask 🙂

Worst thing about the new campaign: The bad German accent, the badly pronounced German words, the fandom trying to write out the accent phonetically (don’t. Ever. With any accent.), people scrambling to spell the badly pronounced German words.

(Liam’s German is fine. And I’m sure his accent is fine by what Americans think Germans sound like standards.)

The town is called Trostenwald. Their beer is called Trost. That means solace. Naming a beer solace is a very German thing to do, to be fair. Wald means forest. They are in Solace Forest.

The family is called Baumbach. The au part is not pronounced as an o. We are not French. It’s uh-oooh. Or like “about” without the consonants. It means tree and stream. As in tiny river.

The German word “Vater” is pronounced just like father, but without the h. The V makes an F sound. Sam said it at one point.

I think Caleb referred to Nott as “Das ist meine Mädchen” or “Das ist meine Liebchen.” Couldn’t tell on the spot. It either means “that’s my girl” or “that’s my dear”. “Meine” is not the right form of my, though, because everything ending in -chen is a dimunitive and gets neuter pronouns. Kind of like the Japanese -chan, actually, but not used to address people at all.

(And that’s why the German word for girl isn’t feminine but neuter. Wheee.)

I’m not even going to try and explain how the “ch” is pronounced. There’s two different ways.

Okay, like, if you’ve read this rant up until this point, I guess I can put in the minimal effort of trying to sound it out on vocaroo. That used to have better recording quality back in my day. I am so sorry.

https://vocaroo.com/i/s1Q8CDbF8FnH

…I’ll stop now.