German J Sound

[Cristoforo Kanoy]

Answer: That was Jens making the German r sound. When the letter r appears at the beginning of a word, it makes a rolling sound way in the back of your throat. Give it a try. Make an r sound, then pretend you are gurgling while you do it.

Answer: That was Jens yodelling. The good news is that b makes the same sound in both English and German. In fact, there are lots of letters that make the same sound in German and English: f, h, k, l, m, n, p, t.

I have created a little CLI tool that translates the original Asterisk transcriptions and generates new sound files based of that. It uses ChatGPT and DeepL for the translation and the Google Text-To-Speech API for the sound files. There is also a transcription for sounds that are missing in the original transcriptions.
Here is the link to the Github repository:
-sound-generator

New German Sound Files (99,9% Coverage)
There are a lot of missing German sound files in FreePBX. This makes a lot of modules like the Voicemail unusable. This is the reason why I have created this tool.

German is a very vowel-rich language. There are reasonable vowel definitions containing 23 of them (see, e.g., this list) plus three diphthongs. Consequently, vowels have a high information density, we do not have to use that many of them, which in turn leads to a high consonant density. To somewhat exemplify this, consider words like zwingst, blinkt, strickt, hltst.

Relatedly, we rarely have vowels in directly following each other. This almost only occurs in diphthongs, of which we have only three, and when a word stem ending on a vowel is followed by an inflectional morphem beginning with a vowel such as in sen or schreien. (See below, if you think that two vowels follow each other in words like beerdigen.) This is intertwined with the high vowel density, as direct vowel collisions would inevitably lead to some diphthongisation, which would make the distinction of words very difficult (23 vowels are already difficult to distinguish). Again, this leads to a high consonant density.

Voiced consonants are very unlikely to follow a short vowel. Just think of how few words there are which are spelt with bb, dd, gg, vv or ww. Moreover, ss does not indicate a short vowel preciding a voiced s, but an unvoiced s.

Finally, the voiced counterpart of the sch sound (ʒ) occurs only in a few loanwords such as Garage. So, we are short of a voiced consonant in comparison to some other European languages. Moreover, many Southern dialects and varieties of German lack the voiced s altogether.

As @Jan said, the so called Auslautverhrtung definitely plays into that, but if you think in terms of pronunciation and intonation you'll also notice that many languages link their words together in ways that the German language simply doesn't.Take English for example; among other things, words that begin with a vowel are usually linked to the word that comes before them.

In written English you see that those are two words, but if you didn't know any English and you heard those two words, you wouldn't know where the first ended and the second began. That's the kind of linking between words that you don't really find in German and I take it speakers of foreign languages find that rough and perhaps even "unnatural". My English pronunciation professor likes to say, that "Germans don't like their words to touch each other." Think of any German sentence and try it out.

You can clearly distinguish each word as a single entity. No word ending slides into the subsequent word. Compare that to English and you'll either sound like a robot or like you're angrily forcing each word out at a time. (You're hopefully not a robot.)

Another thing is the pitch of your voice. Obviously voices vary in pitch, but in general you notice that other languages use a much wider range than German does. It makes it sound a little monotonous compared to other languages.

In German, (almost) all unvoiced stops are aspirated, whether they occur word-initial (Tor) word-final (rot) or word-internal (hatte). By comparison, in French or Finnish stops are always unaspirated and in English they are usually only aspirated in word-initial positions. The aspiration often causes speakers of those languages to perceive German as rather harsh and often even perceive a German accent in their own language as harsh.

A milder, second aspekt is the presence of up to all four different affricates: tz, tsch, pf and in dialects kch. While ts and tsch are somewhat known across many languages (and, ironically, tsch is rather rare in German), pf and kch are very rare across the world and only occur in German across the developped countries. Especially the non-dialectal pf may also contribute significantly to perceived harshness.

I think it mostly has to do with the terrible history of Germany in the 20th century:mostly WW-II, Hitler and the Holocaust. This has left the Country as well as the language with a really bad reputation over the years. In Countries like the US, and even England, most people still draw their knowledge of Germany from the many Hollywood Nazi Movies - with tall blonde Soldiers shouting around orders, running into combat like robots from Star Wars (guess who was the Prototype for the Empire), and laughing like evil devils.

Now - that being said, many German dialects could sound a bit harsh to the average Englishspeaker even if History had gone down a different path. I noticed that (British, and even US) English is generally more polite than the major northern German dialects. Also, while seeming a little bit rude at times, German is still very formal: The kind of Wordgames, and new Word creations that is common in English, and especially the humor has only started to enter spoken common German the last 20years or so. I have to admit that I sometimes miss the humor and lightness so common in general English conversation when I am in Germany. But it's not the only Country to have that problem, and that is not a general characteristic of the language itself.For example, if you go from Bavaria to Austria,Vienna, people have a more laisser-faire way, and they speak, even though akin to Bavarian dialect, in a more melodic, sing-sang and humorous tone. And even though Viennese does have a lot of peculiarities, it still IS the same (German) language...

Die sogenannte Hochsprache dagegen klingt hart. Sie ist knstlich. Sie wurde fr die Schrift entwickelt und auf die Schrift ausgerichtet. Niemand hat frher so gesprochen. Hochdeutsch wurde ber die Schule und das Militr ausgerollt. In Norddeutschland mute Hochdeutsch sogar als Fremdsprache gelernt werden, weil es sehr weit von den niederdeutschen Dialekten entfernt ist.

Run a search on silly language memes on Google and most of them will be Differenze Linguistiche panels portraying German as the language of fiery eyed, toothy MS Paint sketched heads with highly suspicious little mustaches.

We know that it is the second most common language within the scientific community and that Germany, and its language, have helped shape the world into what it is today. German is the 7th most commonly spoken language in the United States with over 1.1 million speakers. It is one of the few lucky languages other than Spanish that high schools still manage to find occasional funding for.

English is a Germanic language and despite having absorbed an immense amount of French, Latin, Greek, Celtic or more recently, Spanish; English is still closely related to its Central European cousin.

These memes feature lists of fairly common words, like helicopter. ambulance or island, and then show the word translated (probably by Google) into a number of other languages. The languages are all selected because they are fairly simple cognates of one another, or because they all sound short, pleasant or simple to pronounce. Take the example here on the left:

But French is rarely at the butt of a differenze linguistiche meme, and while the beret may be another silly, unnecessary stereotype, at least nobody is being likened to a roid-raged megalomaniac with sharp, pointy teeth. As you may have guessed, German is frequently the victim of these linguistically ridiculous comparisons, as evidenced by the meme below.

Apex-editor of Languages Around the Globe, collector of linguists, regaler of history, accidental emmigrant, serial dork and English language mercenary and solutions fabricator. Potentially a necromancer. All typos are my own.

In historical linguistics, the High German consonant shift or second Germanic consonant shift is a phonological development (sound change) that took place in the southern parts of the West Germanic dialect continuum in several phases. It probably began between the 3rd and 5th centuries and was almost complete before the earliest written records in High German were produced in the 8th century. From Proto-Germanic, the resulting language, Old High German (henceforth, OHG), can be neatly contrasted with the other continental West Germanic languages, which for the most part did not experience the shift, and with Old English, which remained unaffected.

This phenomenon is known as the High German consonant shift because the core group affects the High German languages of the mountainous south.[4] It is also known as the "second Germanic" consonant shift to distinguish it from the "[first] Germanic consonant shift" as defined by Grimm's law and its refinement, Verner's law.

The High German consonant shift occurred not in a single movement but as a series of waves over several centuries. The geographical extents of these waves vary. They all appear in the southernmost dialects, and spread northward to differing degrees, giving the impression of a series of pulses of varying force emanating from what is now Austria and Switzerland. Some are found only in the southern parts of Alemannic German (which includes Swiss German) or Bavarian (which includes Austrian), but most are found throughout the Upper German area, and some spread into the Central German dialects. Indeed, Central German is often defined as the area between the Appel/Apfel and the Schip/Schiff boundaries, thus between complete shift of Germanic /p/ (Upper German) and complete lack thereof (Low German). The shift /θ/ > /d/ was more successful; it spread all the way to the North Sea and affected Dutch as well as German. Most of these changes have become part of modern Standard German.[5]

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