The man who taught Germans to speak
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- čas přidán 2. 07. 2024
- Until the end of the 19th century, there was no official way to speak German. This was a problem that Theodor Siebs felt needed a solution: a modern society needed an agreed common dialect that anyone could use. And so Siebs, with a few colleages and some friends from the world of theatre, developed a new standard for the spoken German language.
But for it to be accepted, a new technology had to be invented. Fortunately for Siebs, that invention was just around the corner.
Chapters:
00:00 A tale of two pronunciations
01:21 Theodor Siebs
02:17 Setting standards
03:03 Stage Pronunciation
04:16 The road to recognition
05:16 The final G
06:26 An exception to the rule
Music:
"Style Funk" and "Hot Swing"
by Kevin MacLeod incompetech.com/
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That was all completely new to me. Never heard the guys name. Crazy that every German knows the Duden but not Sieb. Thanks for providing me with this most interesting piece of knowledge.
My wife also: when I told her I was making a video about Theodor Siebs, her response was, "Theodor who?"
@@rewboss I heard about his book in school, and most certainly his name was mentioned, but this is information you forget as you hear it. So thank you for refreshing my knowledge.
"Wer schreibt, der bleibt" - that's why we all know Konrad Duden but not Theodor Siebs.
You wouldn't know about Duden either, if there would not be his book everywhere.
How did that not come up in my German studies at university? Grimm, Lachmann, Duden... but not Siebs. Thanks for unearthing this, it was enlightening.
When taking enunciation lessons in university, it was quite common for us to say "könich" naturally but hypercorrecting it for "official" speech to "könik" because that's how it's written, only for the teacher to correct us back to "könich" because of this.
The harder part was to get us Saxons to actually pronounce a ch, though, and not to say "gönish".
Yep, I have experienced this as well, it's very common to mistakenly correct "Könich" to "König" when trying to speak proper standard German, even though "Könich" is already correct!
As long as you pronounce Leipzsch correctly ;)
well to me it sounds more like Läbzsch 😅
Yes, but make no mistake. As soon you speak of more than one König ( Könich). it's Könige ( no Frikkative)@@DerMef
Even more confusingly, most people actually pronounce Schleswig with a hard g, even up here.
I had only been in Germany for a short time, and was unsure how to pronounce a word, and asked my colleague if it was correct (was das richtig?) using the soft fricative sound. He said I was correct except that I had pronounced “Richtig” incorrectly. There followed a heated discussion between him (from Bavaria) and his girlfriend (from the north) about the correct way to pronounce “richtig”, I thought “wow! They can’t even agree on the correct way to pronounce ”correct”!”.
But he was wrong and his girlfriend was right, as you just learned in this video. In standardized german it is a fricative.
@@Quotenwagnerianer And that is where you are wrong. Nowadays, the southern German pronunciation is also deemed right. On websites such as Wiktionary, you will come across both pronunciations displayed equally and without any comment. However, the preferred choice of the media is another matter.
War das richtig?
@@louismart This is the same question that I sometimes get about English. The question about "Is bath with a short a (as in northern English dialects) or bath with a long a (as in southern English dialects) the correct one?? Well, just as in German with the hard and soft g at the end of richtig, they are all correct. There is no right or wrong. As Flubberfrrosch says, the national media will choose one of them. But local radio in southern Germany uses the hard g and local radio in the north uses the soft g.
I once tried to get a bunch of British people to agree on how to pronounce "lever". similiar results.
As a native speaker, I learned something here. Many thanks!
There is an explanation for why only "-ig" is pronounced with a fricative. The process that turned final g's to fricatives started with high front vowels (i, ü), and spread to others. These changes in turn spread across the German language, with "-ig" spreading farthest simply because it had had more time. That is why you can say "Flukzeuk", "Flukzeuch", and "Fluchzeuch", but never "Fluchzeuk": if you have a fricative after "u", you certainly have it after "i".
And this all goes to show that even a "standard" language has phonological exceptions, processes that are mid-way, or frozen in time.
A very important distinction, indeed! Thank you, I was just about to write down these examples as well 👌
Flugzeuch or Wech sounds so wrong please just stop it.
@@GrandTheftChris Eigentlich heisst es ja auch Fliegzeug. So wie Spielzeug und nicht Spulzeug ;)
Fluchzeug seems to be a very useful word though.
@@salia2897 Yes, a swearing device comes in handy from time to time ;-)
Thanks for making me question how I pronounce Schleswig for 10 full minutes xD
And I still don't know how to pronounce "Schleswig-Holstein" if not with a -g- in Schleswig. Schleswicholstein? Sounds strange to me.
Glad to not be alone with that.
@@eisikater1584 After 15 years here, I do believe that the local pronunciation is indeed schleswicholstein. But then again, this is the Real North.
We say Schleswich-Holstein, I think it is easy. The h of Holstein is not very strongly pronounced, just a little breath between 'wich and 'ol. Also, I have heard many southerners say Hohlstein and that sounds stupid, it should be short
@@eisikater1584 correct: Schleswich-Holschtein
VERY INTERESTING!
As a native German speaker, I didn't know all this - and I'm sure many Germans don't know either.
Great work!
I am a native speaker and come from the middle of Germany and I constantly switch from the northern to the southern pronuciation and back (i.e. sometimes I use the northern pronunciation "Könich" and sometimes the southern pronuncation "Könik"...). However, I am not choosing consciously, it's just purely coincidental how I pronounce words in "-ig". :)
Am from Thüringen. I use only the ch pronunciation
I come from Braunschweig and noticed that I randomly switched my pronunciation of the city name. I had no idea which one was correct. Then, one day, I saw the mayor of Braunschweig on TV and said to myself - I am gonna check now how he says it, he must know. He said the city name twice in one sentence, and said it differently within the same sentence! Just like me.
Thanks, British guy, for explaining my mother tongue to me. It is "Braunschweich" in someting called official Siebs German Stage Language. Who knew.
@@doczoocLaut Wiktionary wird es mit [k] ausgesprochen. Ich nehme an, die „ig“-Regel gilt nicht für Diphtonge wie „eig“. Man spricht ja „Zeug“ in der Standardaussprache auch nicht „zoich“ aus, sondern „zoig“.
@@doczooc I do switch as well, but not randomly. I adapt to the environment. Being born and raised in Schleswig-Holstein, but living in Berlin now (and being surrounded mostly by people who were not raised here...), I have a slight southern leaning, but as soon someone else in the room speaks with a northern pronunciation, I switch back to my "native German".
Was on the train from Munich to Hamburg and for half of the trip, the conductor was apparently Austrian and kept telling us the train is headed to Hambuak, wherever that is...
A (Northern) German walks into a bar in Vienna...
German: "Juter Mann, kann man hier Rum kriechen?"
Waiter *pointing to the floor*: "Wann'S wolln... bitte..."
I am an Austrian actor and "Bühnendeutsch" is an important part of acting school (or private acting lessons), even in Austria. We use a couple of pronunciation training books where Siebs is mentioned. I have to look at them again, maybe there is some more info about him in them.
Alles, was Sie brauchen ist "Der kleine Hey". Was der arme Mensch in seinem Video vergißt, ist, daß es nicht nur auf die richtige Aussprache ankommt, sondern auf die Stimme und die Intonation und die Pausen. Engländer sind einfach so kaputt. Auf der ekligen Insel müssen Sie eine Eliteschule besuchen, um "akzentfreies" Englisch zu sprechen. In Deutschland reicht der Theaterbesuch oder die Audition von Hörbüchern mit unseren besten Deutschsprechern und Deutschsprecherinnen. Wir brauchen keine Toffs, die sich für weiß was halten, uns reichen die Mimen. Für uns ist das etwas Musikalisches, und nicht ein Zugehörigkeitsausweis zu einer Klasse. Und hier haben auch all die Abstufungen der Mundarten ihren Platz. Von einer leichten Intonation bis hin zum ausgeprägten Dialekt, alles Klang und Musik, alles Melodie. Daher auch die große Akzeptanz von Musik aller Art und die reiche Kompositionskunst. Das verbindet Deutschland mit Österreich. Die Schweizer tun sich da ein wenig schwer. Spricht man Hochdeutsch in der Schweiz, dann geraten die immer schrecklich unter Druck, als wäre Hochdeutsch ein einziger Vorwurf an die Schweizer und ihre bizarren Endungen und Verkomplizierung von Wörtern, die so einfach sein können. Aber die Eidgenossen wollen es so.
I saw an ad last year on a poster and found it hilarious. "So cremig, das nehm ich." I grew up in Saxony-Anhalt and NRW but the last 16 years I've lived in southern Hesse. That slogan just does not work here. It was very obviously not created by anyone living south of Kassel.
Frankfurt is well south of Kassel last time I checked, and the normal pronunciation of -ig here is definitely -ich. :p
Well, -ich or -isch, depending on how dialectal you want to be. But certainly not -ig.
@HeadsFullOfEyeballs it varies a lot but I definitely hear -ig at least as much as -ich and -isch here in Frankfurt with people my age (early 20's). I also say mostly -ig with a few -ich and -isch too
Could we get more videos on this topic? I found it rather fascinating, I had never head of Siebs, only of Duden and the difference between southern and northern prononciations are extremely interesting.
This reminds me of a former conductor of a choir I was part of. He cited Siebs quite often, telling us how to pronounce this and that, e.g., that it is „Könich“ (König) but „könicklich“ (königlich).
Exactly. "Wichtich", but "wichtiger". I assume Siebs had good reason to do it that way, but it seems unnecessarily complicated to me. Unfortunately, it's surprisingly difficult to find much information about him.
'Köniklich', but 'Könichtum', the pronounciation of '-ig' depends on the following consonant, if there is one.
And yes, I already heard about the "Bühnensprache" (which IMHO is not the same as Hochdeutsch, but in that I'm not sure), and also have seen some written rules about that. But I cannot remember having heard the name Siebs before.
@@rewboss In case of doubt , for a foreigner, always use the Southern ig, it never really sounds wrong or socially misplaced at most it sounds southern.
@@ReinhardHahn-vs2dh Konigtum sounds weird, never heard. Seems like a approximative translation of kingdom. I'd say Königreich, The Duden say with the g not the ch. The Duden say Königtum is "veraltetert". Older than myself it seems,
@@HelmutQ Analoge Bildung zu Bistum (Bischofreich?) und Herzogtum (Herzogreich?) würde ich mal annehmen - aber es hat sich jeweils nur eine Form durchgesetzt.
This reminds me of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda around the same time setting Sephardic Hebrew (and specifically Algerian) as the standard pronunciation. And I recall Nynorsk being formulated around the same period in Norway as well. So it was the hot trend.
And before anyone says it, the uvular trill in modern Hebrew comes from the old Judeo-Iraqi dialect of Arabic, not Yiddish, and it only caught on starting in the 1950s. I’m unaware of any dialect of Yiddish which has that sound. True, German does, as shown in this video, but Yiddish had been effectively instinct in Germany since Napoleon. And there have been internal sound changes since then unrelated to any outside influence.
Very true, regarding Norwegian.
However, there they actually came up with the compromise of two standard dialects, "Nynorsk" (New Norwegian) and "Bokmål" (Book Language) and each Norwegian canton chose one dialect as a standard and the other one as a mandatory school subject.
@@SamAronow What uvular trill? I've almost always heard Hebrew spoken with an uvular fricative (ʁ rather than ʀ), rarely with an aveolar trill (in non-Ashkenazi Hebrew), correct me if I'm wrong. And I've never heard a Yiddish speaker use anything else than a uvular fricative, even in the oldest films. As far as I know, the consonant system of Ivrit is based on Ashkenazi Hebrew, which in turn is very similar to Yiddish and ultimately German.
Well what do you know, a time where they tried to construct national identities they tried to construct languages for those nations.
@@timkratz742 Having lived in Israel for six years, all I've heard from natives is a uvular trill or uvular approximant stemming from a trill, and I've only ever heard Yiddish speakers using an alveolar tap. Ashkenazi Hebrew has _way_ more sounds than Sephardic or standardized Hebrew; if it had been based off of Ashkenazi pronunciation, non-initial ת would be pronounced /s/ instead of /t/ and there would still be 8 vowels (as it was in ancient times) instead of just 5.
Me, a Northerner, I got a lot of laughter by southerners, asking in the middle of the pandemic: Seid Ihr alle gut väsorcht? They understood: verseucht. I meant to say: versorgt.
This is a great video! As a german from northern germany I never new or even asked the question, if the german radio broadcasting had something similar to the recieved pronunciation. Thanks for casting a light on this topic!
I am a radeio presenter on a loacal station in bavaria. i had to learn this pronountiation but never knew the backgrounds. thank you Andrew!
As a born and raised Schleswig-Holsteiner I can kinda corroborate this. I would NEVER pronounce the G in Schleswig as a G (or K), but whether I pronounce the G in Hamburg as a G or a CH depends on how northern I want or don't want to sound.
Here in Poland we are taught the standard German pronunciation as everywhere else but due to similarities in spelling between languages as well as long contact with Germany, the actual pronunciation of German words favours the central-southern accents. So, Hamburg is /'xamburk/, Schleswig is /'ʂlezvik/ and Freiburg im Breisgau is /'frɨburk/.
Xamburg sounds like a Startup from Berlin
@@begone2753This X in "xamburk" stands for a guttural sound what is called in German "ach"-Laut. So "xamburk" would be pronounced something like "chamburk" if you would write it with German letters.
@@Dueruemtarget coincidentally also how you'd write the phonetic pronunciation out in Polish too
@@cameroneridan4558 well h also works as ch in polish but not in german
So all three city names are incorrect.
When my mom learned to write as a kid, she wrote the city of Duisburg as "Düsbuich", which I believe, the city should adopt as their official name.
Same goes for Doatmunnd
Very interesting, I didn't know about Siebs, but shouldn't you mention also that the standard version is called 'Hochdeutsch' - High German? Also I would say Schleswig with a long E - schlEHswig, like BrEHmen. Glad you are sharing positive messages about Germany and the German language with the world.
Didn't you notice that rewboss's skill level with vowel lengths is still slightly behind? But to be fair, it's one of the hardest things for a native English speaker to get right, as English doesn't have semantic vowel length.
@@HenryLoenwind Well, he said / schlezwig / instead of /schlehswig / but I'm not quite sure of the meaning of semantic vowel length.
@@AidanEyewitnessSemantic, as in "changing the meaning". For example, "betten" and "beten". Those are two different words and the only difference is the length of the vowel.
English doesn't have that feature. It has words where the "proper" pronunciation includes vowel length, but it's not semantic. "steel" and "still" are such a pair, yet in many areas, those sound the same. Listeners may find it hard to recognise which word was said if someone pronounces "steel" with a short "ee", but they don't get the same "you used the wrong word" feeling a native German speaker would get. For them, long and short "ee"s are semantically the same, just like "st" and "scht" are the same for a German speaker.
Weirdly here in Norway we did not really end up with any real "standard" pronunciation, instead we ended up with 2 official written forms of Norwegian: "bokmål" (lit. "Book Language", basically standard Danish with some revisions) and "nynorsk" (lit. "New Norwegian" which is a constructed dialect created as a hybrid of several dialects with a bias towards western and central inland dialects), in addition we also have 2 unofficial variants "riksmål" (lit. "Kingdom/Country Language", the prefix "riks-" have about the same meaning as "reichs-" in German, a more conservative, i.e. more Danish variant of bokmål) and "høgnorsk" (lit. "High Norwegian", a more conservative form of nynorsk i.e. fewer allowed loanwords and preferring the least Danish sounding forms).
But we don't really have an official standard for pronunciation; in practice the most widely understood form of Norwegian is bokmål with an Oslo accent (the western Oslo dialect is also basically the same as bokmål/riksmål) since abut 1/4 of the population live in or around Oslo. But in general everyone speaks their own dialect, only modifying their vocabulary closer to either bokmål or nynorsk still in their native accent when speaking to people from everywhere in the country such as in broadcasts. Even when people from different dialects are having trouble understanding a dialect word, we typically still will not change accent when explaining an uncommon dialect word; only as a last resort if you really struggle will people switch to a Oslo accent (usually somewhat mocking tone) and "translate" the word to standard bokmål. So in that sense the Oslo dialect is the de facto standard; but being unable to understand other accents and dialect words is seen as rather embarassing, and refusing to understand a different dialect; which usually only old (60+) "posh" people would ever do; is seen as very arrogant.
Though when talking to immigrants, we'll generally gladly speak bokmål in a (often very broken) Oslo accent or some other accent the immigrant in question is more familiar with; because after all you probably need to grow up here to understand all the accents.
Thanks for your insights! I know an immigrant living in the west, but in spite of the fact he learned and speaks in Bokmal variant!
Interesting. But I thought that "riksmål" was just the older word for "bokmål" and has become obsolete as a term and even as a living language now with the modifications introduced to bokmål in time?
@@geotropa1043Correct, it is the old name of bokmål, but theres also some people today who still use a form of bokmål where they reject most/all of the spelling reforms since before the name change and therefore call what they write "riksmål". My impression is it's mostly teens and young people who do it just to be silly and contrarian; as well as a small minority of weird and very conservative people who genuinely use it unironically.
Wow. Sounds like my stubborn Norwegian-American relatives inherited their stubborn genes!@@SteinGauslaaStrindhaug
Very interesting. However, as a native speaker who grew up in Schleswig-Holstein, I would pronounce the e in "Schleswig" like the first syllable in "lesen", not like the first syllable in "hässlich". And yes, I do say "Schleswich", and "König" rhymes with "fröhlich" (but "Könige" doesn't rhyme with "fröhliche", now that I think about it, so the spelling -ig does make sense even with North German accent.).
Theodor Siebs is probably one of the people I did not know of till today who had the most influence over my daily life. Very interesting video!
Wow, kudos! That was a very interesting and informed dive into the history of the German language - and you definitely taught me, a native speaker, a thing :) Thanks a lot!
Very nice video. As someone who grew up and went to school in Vienna, we learned a different version of why things are supposed to be pronounced this or that way. We were told that the correct way to speak (purportedly accepted throughout the German-speaking "world") is burgtheaterdeutsch. Specifically, the way Paula Vessely spoke. So if she said Schleswich or bestaeticht (which she did), then that was correct. But, again allegedly, she didn't pronounce things this way following Siebs, but because the Burgtheater crew had decided that this sounded nice and was easy to understand across the theater before microphones, amplifiers, and speakers were available. Your version is probably more accurate, though the two stories don't strictly contradict each other (leaving aside that Paula Vessely is too recent...) Maybe it's worth theorizing that what Siebs got from the theater managers was based on experience involving accoustics in large enclosed spaces. --> Important insights for helping baddies choose the perfect language to address their armies of minions.
Wow! I learned a lot of my own language! I never knew that before.
I am from southern Germany. I am swabian. And we - exactly as you told - say "Hamburk", "Fraiburk" and "Schleswik".
And by the way, in our dialect there's no soft "s" like a bees humming.
We always say "s" sharp. My son said, 'glittering'. (As a child he can't say "s" but something like a "th" in English.
Thank you very much for the interesting video.
Very nicely made videos! Interesting to listen to!
Was du immer so ausbuddelst. Wieder etwas gelernt. Danke. 👍🏾😎
Tolles und sehr informatives Video
"Modern Standard German looks Southern, but sounds Northern" god that actually explains so many things, I never thought about that
Greetings from Germany!
I'm was raised in the north (Schleswig-Holstein) and we pronounced the "g" in "Hamburg" the same as in "Schleswig". And the "e" in Schleswig like a "long e" as in "Schnee". I always knew the first one is northern dialect but thought it the second one is not dialect but maybe I'm wrong.
Nice Video! Thanks!
It makes a lot of sense to pronounce these 2 cities the Sieb way. Hamburg pronunciation is consistent with how "Burg" is pronounced in general. This way all the cities ending in -burg are pronounced the same and you dont need to know where it is or whatever. The pronunciation of Schleswig is consistent with all words ending in -ig, like "fertig" "König" and so on. Which is indeed the northern German way though. If you pronounce all -ig words the southern way with a hard "g" then it is fine to pronounce Schleswig this way as well. Basically, "-rg" is pronunced always the same and "-ig" is pronounced always the same.
The idea of taking inspiration from actors to standardize a language is probably the most clever idea I have ever heard of. That's thinking out of the box
It's one of those ideas that you would never have thought of yourself, but when somebody else thinks of it your reaction is, "Of course! It's so obvious!"
Which is usually the hallmark of a clever idea.
@@rewboss indeed!
Wow, every day you learn something new. Even as a German native I love to watch your videos. I love your humor and I always learn something new about Germany or the German language.
And that our language is spelled in a southern German style but pronounced in a northern style was absolutely new to me.
CZcams:ROBERT SEPHER mit seinem zuletzt eingestellten Video.
Great informative video!
A small detail (maybe you left it out for the sake of brevity?): The pronunciation standard today is based on Siebs but not exactly his version. In Siebs' stage pronunciation, "Mutter" would actually sound ['mʊtər], not ['mʊtɐ], which is the standard now.
Standardized dialects envolve over time, like every dialect does. There are also clear differences between modern Received Pronunciation and the RP of the 1930s, which you can very clear hear in words like "often".
I persume that this change in pronouciation also has to do with the increasing quality of sound in radio etc which makes it no longer nessecary to have a very clear and unique pronounciation for euch syllabe. An example where the unverstanding still is difficult is when a choir sings, so there the 'r' of 'Mutter' normally is not omitted.
@@ReinhardHahn-vs2dh Also Till Lindemann 😁
Thanks for a very informative posting. As an enthusiastic German language student who can read and write but can't understand the spoken German of any of my neighbors, I keep wishing that folks would at least choose a common way of speaking. (I've got to give up on that!) This bit of history feels enlightening. It gives me a bit of perspective on why things are as they are.
I especially enjoy when your postings have something important to teach me. But you can just be funny if you wish.
Well, tell that the Texans I have met.
As a German, I learned something completely new about my own mother tongue! I hadn't known that. Thank you for this information!
Thanks Andy for researching all this informations!
sorry to interrupt you.
Is it "informations" or is it "pieces of Information"?
Very helpful, thanks a lot from near Schleswich
As a southern German no one ever told me it was Schleswich and except for northern Germans Ive never heard anyone say it that way I and most people I know have always said Schleswig. The ch ending is going to make you sound very weird here.
Well, that was implied in the video: I was taught the Siebs standard, which is as close to official as you can get, but the Siebs standard is not how most native Germans speak IRL.
I also would pronounce "schmutzig" as "schmutzick" and not "schmutzich". I never knew that the official standard for pronouncing "ig" is "ich". I am also from the south if Germany.
As another southern German, I learned it when I attended a course on correct speaking held by an Austrian, of all people, at Freiburg University, of all places. So yes, it's definitely a real thing. And it's a good and fair compromise between the natural pronunciations of north and south.
Did you never listen to the Tagesschau? Since when did anyone ever say "Schleswig-Holstein" without the ch sound?
By the way there is another exacmple of standard german deviating from southern pronouciation: "Ch" at the start of a word. Like "Chemie" or "China" is pronounced as "Kemie" and "Kina " in southern Germany. But not in standard german. There is it is dependant on the following vowel. "a" and "o" turn it into a "K". Like for example "Mitochondrien" being pronounced as "Mitokondrien".
Mitochondrien hat aber keinen K-Laut, sondern ein hartes CH in dem „chon“-Teil@@Quotenwagnerianer
Wow, I've lived here in Germany and spoken German for nearly 40 years, but never heard of Siebs! Thanks for teaching me something new!
Wonderful video!!!!!
I'm impressed 👏👏👏
Very nice, thanks!
Really interesting to hear about him. Duden is well known, but I never ever heard about Sieb. Tbh I didn't catch you saying Hannover wrong in sense of hAnnover instead hannOver, but more that you still phrase it with the English A, so it sounds more like hÄnnover
You live and learn. Thank you!
Fascinating stuff 👍
Super interesting, thank uou!
Das war ja richtig interessant :-) Danke!
Thoroughly enjoyed this!!😂❤
And I love the outtakes so much lol.
It's always a pleasure even as a native to learn something new of my language. Thank you for another great video!
That’s amazing that actually the ‘standardised way’ of speaking German is really so recent! Thank you for this fascinating video!
Having learnt German as a child in the 1960/70s in Hannover from my Grandparents and Mother, I had always just assumed that this was simply the ‘correct’ way to pronounce everything (Hannoverian spoken German is very close….possibly the closet…to this standardised form? ) and that all other accents were in some way ‘wrong’ and not proper Hochdeutsch.
As German is really a second language to me (even though I could speak it before English as a very young child) because I grew up and was educated in London, I have great difficulty understanding anyone speaking in German if they’re not speaking in this standardised form e.g I can almost not understand Bavarians at all!
I never realised that it is actually such a relatively recent adoption and in essence due to one person.
Don't worry, I've been living in Bavaria for ages now and I still can't understand everything people from rural areas say. I do understand quite a few non-standard English dialects strangely enough (far better than crude Bavarian), although I only spent my childhood in an English speaking country.
Too bad Siebs didn't choose Hessian as a point of reference. Hamborsch, lusdisch - so consistent, so easy. ;) By the by: your frontal vowel could be just a tiny bit more open; your Ham still sounds a little too much like Häm (Northerners would disagree).
/a/ is not a front vowel, otherwise you're correct
Very interesting video! I, as an Austrian, I always thought that the "ch" at the end of the words is just a part of the dialects in Germany. Now I know better. Thanks Rewboss!
"Schleswich" but "Schleswig-Holstein".😃 Thank you very much for the excursion into the German Language History.
Great video, very pleasant and informative. Besides Siebs, it was new to me that it is 'received English'.
And, by the way, spoken very well .
It is so often that English speaking people rush and mumble through their sentences.
Love your videos, Andrew...but no matter what Siebs or Duden stated at the time, Hamburg will always be HamburCH except for some stuck-up persons who pronounce it "Hambuig" (yes, with a sort of i before the g). I would normally say FreiburG (I studied there for a while 40-some years ago), and also NürnberG...but then, the Franconians themselves pronounce their biggest city "NermberCH". I guess there's no real right or wrong in that regard. Another example (and a true story, I swear I heard it as a child from whom it happened to): There are areas in North Rhine-Westphalia where a "J" (German: Jot, pronounced yott) is pronounced like a "G" at the beginning of a word or name. A godfather of mine was a Lutheran pastor, and I'll just present his name here as "Jansen" (the original was different). He once went somewhere to register or whatever and said or showed a document that his name was Jansen and he was a pastor. The official said "Ah, your name is Gansen!", and my godfather corrected him, "Nein, Jansen, mit Jot", and the officer answered, "Yes, of course, Reverend, with 'Gott'" (meaning God).
Thank you for clearing that up! I learned German (Hochdeutsch) at school in The Netherlands, but later mainly hung out with people from northern Germany. I picked up bits and pieces of the northern dialects because they are easier for me, and couldn't for the life of me remember how the final g was supposed to sound.
Very interesting! And for you as a brit I guess that a discussion about how placenames are pronounced must feel quite exotic.
Very interesting and informative! Thank you
The only thing I found distracting was the annoying music you chose.
There's a saying in hypnosis: Some music bothers someone, no music bothers no one ;-)
Well, I did once remove it, and people complained. I can't win, basically.
As native German speaker from Austria, a number of things finally make sense now. Thanks! I always believed spoken German to be pluricentric (and it arguably is so) ... Years ago someone working in German radio told me that the -ig fricative is not a regional variant , but the standardised pronunciation, and that they were explicitly taught so at school/uni... To this day, in had never heard about Sieb and his standardised/theatre pronunciation, so I found that hard to believe... (Btw, there is no fricative -ig in Austria, so it even sounds slightly more dialectal to my ears, rather than "standard", just like unvoiced "s” like in "Sieb", etc. - as, like you mentioned, the orthography follows Southern/Bavarian
Linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive. They way people talk is correct in principle. That said, there is something about creating a higher order of a sort of traffic German. For example, I only moved ca 75 miles to go to university and when I let loose in my native dialect where I was studying people had genuinely trouble understanding me.
Also, since the -ig ending of "König" and "Honig" etc. is the only case of pronunciation not mapping onto spelling in German that I can think of off the top of my head I would never dream of correcting anybody about it, native speaker or not. German is hard enough as it is.
das wusste ich alles gar nicht 😁 Danke Dir!
Here in Bavaria, we pronounce both Hamburg and Schleswig with a G.
You're always interesting to listen to, but I really find linguistic videos the most interesting=D
Really interesting. Whilst I have an a level (from 25 years ago) in German, I’ve not really spoken it for years and my visits to German speaking lands have largely been Bavaria and Switzerland (where their pronunciation is very different.
I wasn’t aware there was an official way to speak it - but, as you said, that must be how we (English people) were taught at school.
I’m guessing that the different pronunciations of Hamburg creates arguments in the same way that Newcastle does!
I learned German initially through primarily written-based means, & have at times been told that I speak with a Swabian accent. For instance, I pronounce "durch" as written, not as "doich".
I'm Swiss, but I live in Germany, and through media consumption (mostly online) I assimilated a German dialect to the point where most people can't tell that I'm not native (Swiss people have a very distinct dialect when speaking High German). I believe the German dialect I tend to speak is mostly rooted in NRW, with bits and bobs mixed in from other bigger cities (Hamburg and Berlin come to mind).
If I think with my "Swiss German brain", pronouncing g as a hard "g" is very natural. But through assimilation, whenever I speak "German German", g's like in "Hamburg" get slurred to a soft "-ch" ("Hamburch"), mostly because it's less effort.
NRW is super interesting if you're interested in dialects. There are so many dialects that sound so incredibly different (Rhine area, Siegen, Ruhr area, Westfalia) -- not to mention that you get the complete picture with both northern and central German dialects in one state.
I believe you mean "accent" not "dialect". Swiss speak various dialects, if they speak "standard German" they usually have a strong accent. An accent is just a slight variation in pronunciation, a dialect is a variation of a language affecting vocabulary and grammar.
I as a German from NRW don't understand anything in Swiss German. I really need subtitles if someone is speaking Schweizerdeutsch. Because I don't understand enough to kow about what the person is speaking. I don't understand enough bawarian too but swiss dialect is literally nonintellible for me
@@RagingGoblin I lived my whole life in NRW and if you ask me, NRW's dialects died out long ago,
@@sandralison7584 literally one step behind or two of artificial german.
My native language finnish, was in a very similar position in the 19th century.
I didn't know any of this, very interesting stuff.
In Switzerland it's obviously very different. In writing we use Swiss Standard German which is a variation of Standard German with some changes to vocabulary (e.g. Trottoir, Coiffeur/Coiffeuse, Perron, Portemonnaie, Poulet), spelling (e.g. Sauce, Cousine), some words meaning different things and most importantly, there's no ß.
As for pronunciation, it's a case of "just try your best or whatever", maybe Radio and TV have a standard, I don't know. Outside of that, the dialects are way more popular anyway, even many programs on TV and on the Radio are in the dialects. And then everyone just speaks their own dialect and we mostly get by.
About your pronunciation: I notice that (in this video and similar ones) your "a" sounds different from what I would considered normal: It sounds like in the word "apple", whereas the usual pronunciation is less open and therefore sounds darker. From what I've heard from your German though, you don't always do it that strongly. When you speak entire sentences without focusing too much on the pronunciation of individual words it tends to mostly (but I guess not completely) go away. This of course isn't a problem, my guess is that it's just how most people find out that your native language is English. At least I don't really notice anything else that sounds non-native.
So Swiss-Germans are multi-tiered :
- with family, friends and neighbours : dialect
- within Swiss-German community : Standard Swiss-German
- with French-Swiss : French or English
- with Germans : Standard German or Standard Swiss-German
- in International relations : English
Swiss-French have only 1 French language since dialects are not much spoken...
@@jandron94 You got one major point wrong: Within Swiss-German community, we nearly always speak our dialects. There are very few situation where we don't.
Most of us also aren't able to differentiate between the standard German languages of Germany and Switzerland.
Also, shame on those who use English as a lingua franca within Switzerland.
@@jonistan9268 Well if someone says Vélo or Merci you know it's Swiss-German and not German, also when I said Swiss-German community I meant the rare occasions when addressing the whole Swiss-German community (like when the CH President makes his annual speech).
Sadly indeed English tends to be more and more spoken in Switzerland, especially in big cities, and the French-Swiss never really did the required efforts to have a good level in German (whatever type of German). For instance quite a few Swiss-German actors played in French in French cinema or tv but I don't expect many French-Swiss actors having played in German in German cinema or TV...
@@jandron94 Yes, there are these situation where Standard (Swiss) German is spoken. It's the language of education, so it's spoken in schools. Speeches are usually in standard German too because you usually prepare them in writing and in theory you don't write the dialect. They should usually also be understood by German speakers who don't understand dialects. It's the language spoken in parliament by Swiss Germans, because otherwise not everyone understands. It's used on TV and on the radio for certain programs. In church it depends on the kind of church you go to, the "official" ones probably won't use dialects. But then again, it's totally fine to use dialects in very formal situations like for example in court, assuming everyone involved understands it.
Thank you, never heard of this. Greetings from "Hamborch"
Thank you for this one. It seems your outside perspective on the German language makes you view such topics clearer than we native speakers do. Also we see again that there's nothing like a pure language, it's only a certain dialect predominanted another.
Wow, very interesting! Learned something today.
I'm from the Northwest and I pronounce the "g" like a "ch" and the word "Regen" (rain) sounds like "reeechen" here. 😂 My pronounciation of Standard German is messed up anyway, because I grew up with Low German ("Plattdeutsch") ... sometimes my Grammar is also off. 🤐😂
Somehow it's nice how diverse the dialects are in our country.
My mother lives for almost 15 years in Bavaria, in the southeast and Saturday I visit her for a week and travel there with Deutsche Bahn (very brave, I know...I'm curious if I arrive reasonably on time) and I'm already mentally preparing myself that I will not understand at least a third of the conversations in Lower Bavarian dialects.😂
If you understand a third, then you already understand more than most Prussians ( = non-Bavarians) do. I'm from a tourist place in Niederbayern, I know what I'm talking about ...
edit: Oh, excuse me, you said you DO NOT understand one third, so you can understand two thirds? Welcome, please apply for Bavarian citizenship! (I mean, that's once we've left the Federation, which probably won't happen, but you never know.)
In Franconian, "Rechn" is also quite common, just with a trilled r. :)
@@Ned-Ryerson And they don't have gonsonands ... ;)
@@eisikater1584 Thanks 😂at least the very old grumpy neighbour of my mum does not jokingly insult me with "Saupreuss!" anymore if I don't understand something 😂 I'm getting used to it, slowly but steadily. And thanks for your offer to the Bavarian citizenship, but I'll stay a "Friesenjung" my whole life I guess 🤭🤭
@@eastfrisianguy Sure you will, just like I'll forever be a "Waidler", a guy from the Bavarian Forest. I traveled a lot when I was young, and I know I can make me some sort of home anywhere, but these hills keep calling me back.
So fascinating to meet Thodor Siebs again - I keep coming across his work.
Among the German far right there was an old tradition of regarding the former Duchy of Slesvig/Schleswig and sometimes all of Jutland as "ancient West Germanic land" which had been colonised by North Germanic Danes and should be reclaimed.
When this went full throttle in the 1930s, some of the Danish agitators (who were pretty right-wing themselves and tried to move the border the other way) contacted the eminent philologist Theodor Siebs who was not into politics and answered that this was unfounded, since old dialects and place names contained nothing West Germanic from the city of Schleswig and northwards. When they published his answer, the Nazis were furious with him and forced the poor man to retract his statements in public.
That was one of the juiciest discoveries in my master's thesis. Later, I discovered that he was deep into Frisian studies, another passion of mine.
In Hamburg sagt jeder Hamburger Hamburch! 😂
Andrew, Schleswig wird mit gedehntem 'e' gesprochen wie Schleeswich. Jedenfalls kenne ich es so. Tipp: Tagesschau hören. Und ich höre gerne Sie! Mit Dresden ist es ähnlich: Dreesden
Ein kurzer Blick auf die Lautrschift hätte da übrigens auch genügt, da steht nämlich ein unübersehbarer Dehnungsdoppelpunkt hinter dem e 😅
It's called "An- und Auslautverhärtung", which means the 1st and last letter can (and the more you go South to Tyrol and the Bavarian dialect, will) be pronounced harder (g -> k, d -> t, b -> p)...
The "Hannoverianische" dialect was elected to be the cleanest and thus made standard.
No Bavarian would even think to say Hamburch though... that's so "plattdeutsch".
Nice vid!
The Hannovarian dialect was not made the standard at all; it's just that middle-class people in Hannover took to speaking the Siebs standard, and so the perception that the "Hannover dialect" is the standard took hold.
Here's an audio recording of a man speaking Hannöversch: so-klingt-deutschland.de/audio/hannoverscher-dialekt
@@rewboss You have to take up that discussion with DDr Peter Ortner, linguist at the University of Innsbruck (I already had the same) :D
It wasn't as much the Hannoverian people, but the House of Hannover (you know, the one with the "Prügelprinz") who pushed for it and eventually got their will...
@@AND-od5jt There is a theory that because the standard for written German was based on High German, speakers of Low German had to learn it as a foreign language. This included the House of Hannover which was particularly dilligent in this matter -- so much so, that members of Hannovarian high society also adopted this standardized dialect, and this gave rise to the popular perception of the Hannover dialect as the "purest High German". I don't know of any evidence that the Hannovarian royal family ever campaigned for their dialect to be made the stardard.
@@rewboss Not sure about any evidence either tbh -- it's a sad time if one can't be sure, if, what the teachers teach is trustworthy...
But all the information provided is to my best knowledge and without falseness -- thanks for providing a reason to look into the matter again, I'll post, if I find useful and trustworthy information!
Again -- nice video... and thanks for the civilized interaction :)
@@rewboss That soundbite you gave us is spoken in a (maybe Hanoverian, don't know, could be) variant of Low German, which is a different language.
6:25 - Actually, the *original* 1900s version of Siebs' “Bühnenaussprache” prescribed a voiced alveolar trill or tap [r ~ ɾ], only in a 1950s revision the voiced uvular trill or the uvular fricative ([ʀ ~ ʁ] in IPA) were allowed - vocalising the rhotic (as the near-open central vowel [ɐ]) was discouraged (except for unstressed monosyllabic words) even in the latest editions of the book, which by then was renamed “Deutsche Aussprache: Reine und gemäßigte Hochlautung” in the 1960s (the 19th edition is from 1969).
There's a handy chart on page 85 in that edition which lays out the prescribed pronunciation patterns.
It can be downloaded from the Internet Archive, if anyone is interested.
It's complicated, because as you state, the standard pronunciation has evolved, as all dialects do. That would have turned a 7-minute video into a 30-minute documentary, which I think would tax the patience of even my most loyal subscribers. But you're right about vocalising the rhotic, that's common practice but it's not Siebs. That one escaped my attention.
This was much more interesting then I initially assumed. I learned something about my own/adopted languege today - in English!
My ancestors were from an area south of Stuttgart near the Swiss border. They immigrated to Nova Scotia in 1752.
You highly simplified the stage pronunciation standard to the point of excluding essential description.
For instance, he favored an alveolar trill for the Rs (which was more common by his time) and to pronounce it clearly even in the syllable coda. There are more details, but that will be nitpicking for a CZcams video. 🤓
I just need to share my experience that I've struggled with standard German's syllable structure which seemed inconsistent and artificial, but I'm just getting by and mending my pronunciation based on where I live.
My experience with (American) English included no struggles at all with its syllable structure and pronunciation since they have evolved naturally and are therefore very consistent, less confusing for brains.
I had to highly simplify it: this is a short video about who created the standard pronunciation of German and how he went about it, not an hour-long documentary about the intricacies of his system and how it has been amended over the years.
The weird short E in your Schleswig pronunciation was stranger to me than the final -ich/-ig ending.
I did German to O-level in the 1960's and was instructed that the final 'g' in a word tended to a 'ch' sound. I have kept up my German in the intervening years with evening classes and latterly receiving German TV and Radio on the Astra 1 satellites. I recently had a holiday in Austria visiting the Christmas Markets in Salzburg, Innsbruck and Munich where my German was well accepted. In fact the dual nationality Hotel owner who was totally bilingual having had a British mother and Austrian father, said when I spoke German , it was like a North German.
as a southern German that speaks mostly high german, I say Schleswig with a "k" sound
Sehr interessant! Die meisten Deutschen kennen Duden und die Geschichte aber nicht Siebs und die Geschichte der Aussprache :)
This is an interesting video for sure and shows wonderfully how High German is the supposed linguistic link between north and south.
I often wonder why things I stumble upon now, were not explained at school back then... and this is one of them.
Something similar occurred in Brazil, but created by big media outlets (radio, TV): they use what they call a "neutral" accent, one that cannot identify the speaker from any part of the country (neither Portugal or Africa).
🤣🤣🤣 What a wonderful description of the dilemma!
I am very fortunate to be bilingual English and German, born in Sussex from a nationalized British father and a German mother, I spent my first school years at an English primary school before our family moved to - tataa - Hamburg, where I still live. With that personal history, I speak both languages with hardly any accent at all, except for a slight southern glitch in English and a slight northern one in German.
Still, the pronunciation of my home town (Germany) differs, depending on which language I am currently using for communication. Hamburg (English) actually does a Ham as in ham and a burg as in burger, whereas my German Hamburg is only closer to the open English pronunciation when I deliberately use a more northern German idiom. In my 'normal' German the Ham in Hamburg does actually sound closer to an English hum as in Humvee (the car) or bumble bee.
However, with a deliberate northern German accent, the pronunciation is even wider to the point where even the g mutates into a ch so a kinda Hammbuich.
Does that make any sense?
Great summary, kudos to you. Might have been worth mentioning that the reason for the -ig pronunciation is that it’s a morpheme used in adjective formation: lustig, fällig, langweilig, etc. I believe it’s cognate with the English -y as in funny, rainy, stuffy. Schleswig just happens to look like it ends with that, so the standard was applied there even though it’s not an adjective.
Sound to me not very convincing. At least as Duden differentiates between 'lustig' and 'höflich' which is for me as a speaker who normally pronouces the '-ig'-ending words like the "Bühnendeutsch" in I some cases hard to remember which written ending is the "Dudenish" one.
@@ReinhardHahn-vs2dhThat's because the -ich already had made it to southern Germany for -lich when Duden froze the spelling. -lich, -ig, and -g are different suffixes and are pronounced as a whole, not split into their letters.
@@HenryLoenwind thanks for clarification! Makes it easier to get the correct spelling in the -lich/-ig cases.
But what would be an example for a suffix -g ?
@@ReinhardHahn-vs2dh That would be "the g is part of the word and not a suffix" case I didn't want to point out separately to not make my post even more convoluted. ;)
The main point I was trying to make is that even so "every letter is spoken" in German, there are still plenty of clusters that are pronounced as a whole and can't be built up from their letters. The simplest example would be "h", "ch" and "sch".
If he was born in Bremen, he probably just wanted to make fun of Hamburg by useing the southern pronounciation.
And still Bremen ended up with the train connection to Hamburg as its best feature... 🙂
Some dialects expand the idea of the fricative at -ig also to -eg; you may know as you live near Aschaffenburg IIRC. Specifically, in Hesse, we pronounce "Weg" like [ve:ç], not [ve:k]. And if you are a true Hessian, you can't say "ch" but make it "sch": [ve:ɕ] (like "Wesch" with long e). Also, the Umlaute undergo the same phenomenon (ä, ö, ü) as they count as fronted like i and e.
(If I may give you a tip for your almost perfect German pronunciation: You should hold the e longer and closer in words like Schleswig; it still sounds a bit too short and open, more like Schlässwig.)
I'm a German and I never knew about Siebs.
Looking at it now that pronounciation difference makes no sense without this explanation but I never noticed before.
Interesting. Had noticed the variation in those final g's, but never knew what was the 'official' pronunciation.
Oops you did it again! :)
You managed to teach me (German) something about my language which I really wasn't aware of - though I am sort of a "word-fetishist", haha.
Thanks for another very informative video. Greetings from nearby (MIL)
fascinating!
Language is a very important part of culture, which is often a very beautiful thing. But this also means that acts of standardization, in writing and in speech, are direct attacks at every group which both doesn't fit the standard and is expected to follow it. Even if Siebs (or Duden) had good intentions, even if he tried to find some kind of compromise, he set certain standards (or rather, people with more power found his ideas for those standards agreeable enough to adopt them). And, like every standard, that excludes some people, that sets a right and wrong, and especially when it comes to language, it's an act of epistemic violence on certain speech communities, certain cultures.
In my opinion, no amount of "helping trade and commerce", or even helping communication across some greater area, can justify that sort of violence. There's a Tom Scott video (titled "How Many Languages Are There?") that ends with him saying:
"Imagine how'd you'd feel if it was English that was endangered, and ask yourself if you'd be okay with the next generations only having translations of the works you grew up with."
This is certainly true for a ton of endangered languages all across the world, but it's just as true for local dialectal varieties threatened by being replaced by a national or otherwise standardized form of the language. Even if at least in some places the vehicle of this violence is "just schools", as an institution schools have certainly been used to enact all sorts of violence up to and including genocide before.
Awesome, thanks! One could argue that the word -burg ("castle") in place names is a common thing in all of Germany, but -wig/-wick/-weig (as in Schleswig and Braunschweig) to my knowledge is exclusive to the Northern / Low German regions. It derived from the word "weich", "soft, flexible", refering to the flexible twigs used to build hedges around a settlement.
Would this not be from Proto-West Germanic *wīk, ultimately borrowed from Latin vīcus?
I doubt that the frequency of place names ending in -wig or similar is in any way related to the reason for this rule. The rule also applies to adjectives and adverbs ending in -ig, and these are far more common.
We can see why this rule makes perfect sense if we look at classical Latin and how it evolved into church Latin and the modern Romance languages. In classical Latin, the letters G and C were always pronounced as a hard G and a K. However, it takes a little bit of effort to pronounce hard G or K correctly if the vowel of the syllable is I or E. The vowel of the syllable is normally the following vowel, except at the end of the word (where it is the preceding vowel).
The consequence of this slight difficulty is that over the centuries, Latin speakers began to pronounce G and C in various 'soft' ways when followed by I or E. In church Latin, Cicero was no longer pronounced Kikero, but Zizero. In Italian, he is pronounced Dschidschero (using German-based phonetic spelling). In Spanish he is pronounced Thithero (where th represents the same sound as in English 'with'.)
This phenomenon is not restricted to Latin. In northern Germany it happened so fast (for G only), that in the end it was extended from words ending in -ig even to words ending in G regardless of the previous vowel. (E.g. Tag pronounced Tach in Hamburg.) In southern Germany it basically never happened. And presumably in a transition zone in between, it happened only for words ending in -ig. Maybe slightly to the north of that zone, it happend to words ending in -ig and -eg, but there aren't a lot of the latter.
Such a transition zone that has already adopted an innovation where the forces for its adoption are strongest, but is still holding out against the same innovation where there is less reason for it, is obviously a good choice for a compromise standard. You don't get the easiest rule this way, but you get one which, while somewhat unnatural to most people, at least doesn't sound completely revolting to anyone.
In the case of Schleswig the etymology is actually Danish, namely 'vig' meaning 'small bay', 'creek'.
The word you have chosen is correct, but your derivation is wrong. The word “Weich” appears in the place name Braunschweig, but it has nothing to do with the adjective “weich” (soft). “Weich” is an old word for village, which the Germanic peoples borrowed as “wīkō” from the Latin “vicus”. In English it is known as “wich” from place names such as Greenwich.
Braunschweig is a distorted High German version of the Middle Low German “Brunswike”. This comes from rebracketing it as Brun-swike instead of Bruns-wike. The more correct High German name would be “Braunsweich”.
And probably, as @troelspeterroland6998 pointed out, Schleswig has nothing to do with any of this, but comes from Old Norse for “bay on the Schlei”.
Norse indeed but not Old. The later change from k to g allows us to be more precise.