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> At first they had suspected the so-called klingelstreich (bell prank), a sometimes popular pastime among German youths. Does German sound funny to everybody
by koolba 1y ago
> At first they had suspected the so-called klingelstreich (bell prank), a sometimes popular pastime among German youths.
Does German sound funny to everybody or just the English speaking world?
- pessimizer 1y agoWe think German sounds too direct, and it makes us laugh. If it were serious and important, it would be in French.
- coldtea 1y agoIt mostly sounds authoritative, unemotional, and sadistic.
- robin_reala 1y agoYou’ve been watching too many WW2 films.
- coldtea 1y agoI've been having actual WW2 Nazis occupy my country and kill family back in the day. Not everybody gets their history from movies. But I'm talking about their regular everyday speaking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghRKZRcxeI4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghRKZRcxeI4
- dpassens 1y agoYou... you don't actually think we talk like that, do you?
- coldtea 1y agoI don't have to think how Germans speak there's no shortage of Germans passing around these parts. That's how it sounds in everyone's ears, in countries with more melodic languages like Spanish or French. (It's not even the pronunciation overplayed in the video for comedic effect, many words are already threatening sounding by themselves, just the letters on page invoke either threat or bureaucracy).
- stavros 1y agoI've had Germans kill family too, but the video above is a non-native German speaker making fun of German words. I agree that German isn't the most pleasant language to hear spoken, but that video isn't evidence.
- coldtea 1y agoNo, but it's a funny reminder of how it's perceived. It's not supposed to be evidence, nor I linked it as if it was some scientific proof settling the matter. Basically captures that part you said "I agree that German isn't the most pleasant language".
- stavros 1y agoFor me, Dutch is even worse. Turkish I also dislike, for some reason, I think because of the throaty "l" sounds. Sorry, Dutch and Turkish friends.
- pavel_lishin 1y agoWait 'til you see Dutch.
- Mordisquitos 1y agoWe hebben een probleem.
- breakingcups 1y agoWe hebben een serieus* probleem. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-hebben-een-serieus-probleem https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-hebben-een-serieus-problee...
- wan888888 1y agoWait till you see Swiss-German English vs. German vs. Swiss-German Nut vs. Nuss vs. Nüssli Mess vs. Durcheinander vs. Chrüsimüsi Rascal vs. Lausbub vs. Glünggi Chicken vs. Huhn vs. Güggeli
- scns 1y agoT-Shirt > T-Shirt > Libli (Leibchen in German)
- decimalenough 1y agoA nacktschneckelich Crimespree like this is no Laughingmatter.
- furyofantares 1y agoImagine not speaking English and reading "ding dong ditch".
- manarth 1y agoImagine learning English in a country without that idiom, and reading it. Not to mention "knock down ginger"!
- stavros 1y agoYeah, knock down ginger was the one I went "wtf?" on, for sure.
- jimnotgym 1y agoMy wife and I grew up about 10 miles apart. She knew those phrases, I didn't. Why? She lived in a town, I lived in the country. Playing that game where I grew up would have been pretty unproductive. Walk a mile>Open gate>dog barks as you walk up drive>farmer comes out and recognises you>says Hello x...
- zahlman 1y agoOr, for that matter, speaking English fluently and not being from whatever part of the US it is that that idiom is specific to.
- Dilettante_ 1y ago"Please to not be ditching your ding dong in front of peoples houses"
- flowerthoughts 1y agoProbably in large part because all after WW2, German has been used exclusively when making fun of a certain dictator, in English. You've been taught that it's funny, if you're in the Western world. Of course, before the radio, making fun of languages couldn't spread that quickly, so German was probably the first language to lose a war (or two) after globalization had started.
- kragen 1y agoI don't think that's it; the usual stereotypes about Hitler and Nazis is that they were brutal, evil, and demanding, which in fact they were, not that they were silly, ridiculous, and goofy. If German sounds funny to English speakers, it's in spite of WWII associations, not because of them. I've thought about this question a lot, and I think the answer comes from the history of English as a creole (or nearly so), consisting of a Germanic substrate being gradually displaced by a Romance prestige dialect, as the nobility all spoke dialects of Old French after the Norman Conquest. Moreover, even after that period, French was the language of diplomacy, while Latin was the language of academia and, until Henry VIII, the Church. Newton published Principia Mathematica in Latin, as was the well-established practice, and for generations studying at Harvard required learning Latin (and Greek) first. English's propensity for accepting loanwords rather than calquing them as is usual in Chinese and German has given us a large vocabulary of Latin words for use in formal contexts. New German loanwords, bu contrast, have largely come in through Yiddish, a language of desperately poor immigrants: schmuck, for example. So it's common to have synonym pairs in which the Germanic term is informal or vulgar, while the Romance term is a formal term, sometimes an inkhorn word. Sour:acid, stuff:material, fuck:copulate, piss:urinate, cunt:vagina, cock:penis, prick:penis, shit:defecate, want:desire, fart:flatulence, balls:testicles, turd:excrement, everyday:quotidian, men:personnel, manly:virile, worldly:mundane, motherly:maternal, house:residence, big:grand, night:nocturnal, twilight:crepuscular, ass:posterior, better:ameliorate, schmuck:prepuce, water:aquatic, water:irrigate, king:monarch, armpit:axilla, cow:bovine, dog:canine, spit:saliva, rot:decay, whore:prostitute, tit:mammary, young:immature, worm:larva, enough:sufficient, grow:develop, sick:infirm, eye:ocular, think:cogitate, reckon:calculate, and so on. Pairs in the other direction are so rare I can't think of one, though I'm sure some must exist. There are cases in this list where a formal Germanic word exists, such as "breast" and "buttocks", but I can't think of a more informal Latinate synonym in those cases. "Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits," which got Carlin arrested in Milwaukee, is Germanic from beginning to end, even "suck". So is Lenny Bruce's list, even though "ass" and "balls" have cognates in Romance languages. All the most taboo words in English except "nigger" are Germanic, and the taboo on "nigger" is recent enough that it's shaped by quite different history—but note that English speakers, to convert the Spanish negro "naygro" into a deprecating term, assimilated it to a more typically Germanic phonetic structure, ending it in a syllabic coda that is common in German and prohibited in French, Spanish, and Italian. (To be fair, "twat" is another possible exception; nobody knows where it comes from. Although a Latin origin is improbable—literacy in Classical Rome was sufficiently broad that we know the word "landīca"—there could easily be some unattested Occitan or Sicilian word from which we get "twat", even if it sounds Germanic phonologically.) And there's an established idiomatic way to dismiss something by reduplicating a word, the second time replacing the onset of its first syllable with the characteristically Germanic onset cluster "schm-" as a form of ridicule: "Police, schmolice!" As a result, to Anglophone ears, German (both phonetically and in its recognizable vocables) sounds like an over-the-top vulgar version of English with words that sound a lot like "schmuckrotfart". 'What do you mean, the word for "oxygen" is "sour stuff"?' So I suspect that German sounding silly and foolish is particular to English speakers.