How To Pronounce Trivial Pursuit

[Edward]

Sohow do you pronounce it! I've been saying "Jagd". Just imagine me saying "Jagged" but without the "e" pronunciation. At my LHS today, one of the old timers said it's said it's pronounced "yagd". I suppose that makes sense as Jger is pronounced "yayger".

In most European languages the "J" is pronounced like an English "Y" (as a consonant- remember in English Y swings both ways, vowel and consonent) so Jagdpanzer is pronounced Yagdpanzer. Then of course there is the umelat thing... the double dots over a vowel, makeing them long vowels in English...

Don't forget, a German 'w' is pronounced like a 'v'. And a German 'v' is sometimes pronounced like an 'f'. And the letter 's' is pronounced like a 'z' but only if it is found at the beginning of a syllable. And the German 'z' is pronounced like 'ts'. Aw, heck with it.

The schoolbook (or tv reporter) ways is: Yahgd" only with the trailing "d" sound bitten off into a t, but not enough to sound like a t.

Jagd and Jger are both from the same German word, Wew could even say "Ein Jger jagd." (A hunter hunts.)

You are quite correct, Jagdpanther is "Yahgd'PANT'ehr") Panzerjger is " The truPANZ ehr YAY ge." The truppen (truh PEN) hauling a PAK for that task would know it as a "PANZ er ahb WHER KAHN own en" if recited in full; else it would be "Pah Ah kah." Unless it wer a FLAK 35, which would be ein "FLAHk DRY SECS" as 3-6 is shorter to say than sechs und dreiig (sex oond' DRY sig).

Germans can be flexible with their abreveiations, too. The television set is abreviated "TV" and even called "Tea VEE" desipite the German being "teh fowh"; that's because the proper German nae is fehrnzehnapparat, or far-seeing machine.

Oh, and you have to be careful with the vowel dipthongs; in German they all have umlauts--e, o, etc. These tend to follow Grecco-roamn roots and (sorta) correspond to and œ and the like.

Edit to add" it's Tah MEE yah, and hah-say Jeh wa

hypertexDon't forget, a German 'w' is pronounced like a 'v'. And a German 'v' is sometimes pronounced like an 'f'. And the letter 's' is pronounced like a 'z' but only if it is found at the beginning of a syllable. And the German 'z' is pronounced like 'ts'. Aw, heck with it.

-The most debated one... Italeri- "It-tah-larry-uh" "It-uh-larry" "Eye-tal-erie" Italy-air-eee-uh" and more. I dont even know. I have heard people swear up and down that in Italy it would be "It-Uh-Larry". IDK No comprede on Italian.

Reminds me of an evening playing trivial pursuit many years back... of course that game is more fun when there are adult beverages involved, so at one point in the game my friend is given the question to "name the famous Japanese monster of a 1954 movie... of course having had his fair share of the refreshing beverages he replies most excitedly, " Oh I know that one- it's Gonzalez!"

I've never asked a German to repeat either the words Tiger or Panther, and I'd expect them to speak it phonetically if they didn't already have it in their vocabulary. I'm sure they all would now. My dyslexic daughter will always pronounce "th" as voiced, as in "the", even for a word with an unvoiced "th" like "thank".

Reminds me of an evening playing trivial pursuite many years back... of course that game is more fun when there are adult beverages involved, so at one point in the game my friend is given the question to "name the famous Japanese monster of a 1954 movie... of course having had his fair share of the refreshing beverages he replies most excitedly, " Oh I know that one- it's Gonzalez!"

It's been a long time since I took the one German course I ever took in college. But my recollection is that "J" was pronounced like "Y" with a barely perceptible "H" in front of it: "hya." And "Z" was pronounced like a hard "S" with a "T" in front of it. I remember the professor saying the sound was found at the beginning of one English word: "tsetse fly."

Another odd thing about transliterations is that most of the Russian words we read were originally transliterated into German - with German pronunciations. My favorite example is a well-known Russian composer. German doesn't normally use the "CH" sound; the closest thing to it is "TSCH." The closest German can come to our long "I" sound is "AI." "K" is prounced the same in both languages. In German, "V" is pronounced like we pronounce "F." So the composer's name is usually spelled "Tschaikovsky." I've seen it (very rarely - but in a book by Leonard Bernstein, no less) spelled "Chikofsky," which is more-or-less how it's pronounced.

CodyJ-The most debated one... Italeri- "It-tah-larry-uh" "It-uh-larry" "Eye-tal-erie" Italy-air-eee-uh" and more. I dont even know. I have heard people swear up and down that in Italy it would be "It-Uh-Larry". IDK No comprede on Italian.

As others have noted, German uses "j" for the sound of consonantal Y in English (Y as a consonant). It's not aspirated, either, as was suggested, there's no "H" sound before it. It is never pronounced like the soft "j" in English, unless where it appears in a word of foreign origin, and even then, the tendency was to spell the world using German phonetics. So, "jungle" was spelled "Dschungel", because that's how it sounded to German ears.

"G" in German is always the hard sound, as in English "gate" or "game", and never soft, except in words of foreign origins, and even then, if it's the first letter, it's not soft--as in "Garage" for example, (except to the Bavarians, when the affect airs by pronouncing words with a French accent--geology, for example, in Hochdeutsch, is "gay-o-lo-gee", both g's are hard. But the Bavarians had close ties to the French for a long time, and so some folks affected to pronounce it "Shay-o-lo-shee". But I think that affectation went out of fashion by the First World War. Still, they refer to the ground floor of a building as the Parterre, among other signs of the influence of French).

A German professor at the joint where I work recommends that his students watch the movie "Das Boot." (Spell checker is alive and well. It tried to turn that into "Ada's Boot."The German pronunciation of "boot," by the way, is "boat.") The German prof says the movie is a virtual catalog of German dialects. I can't hear them.

My British friends have to *** their heads and concentrate to understand my American Midwestern twang. But when I went to Holland (where everybody knows English), the Dutch often thought I was British.

When we all discovered Timberlake Ranch (which is another story down the line), did you ever wonder the origin or how to pronounce your new and/or potentially future zip code address - the little town of Ramah? Were you embarrassed when someone corrected you as you thought for sure there was no way a five letter word could be pronounced 4 different ways? Join the club. This proper name has led me to several hours of trivial pursuit and many interesting discoveries.

Discovery 1) My husband said the name Ramah potentially came from the conquistadors, as rama is the Spanish word for bush. There certainly is a lot of Rabbit Bush in the area. However, we seem to be missing the "h". Andarse par las ramas.

Discovery 3) Ramah is a hill mentioned in the Book of Mormon, Ether 15:11. "And it came to pass that the army of Corantumr did pitch their tents by the hill Ramah; and it was that same hill where my father Mormon did hide up the record unto the Lord, which were sacred." Ramah is also known as the hill Cumorah near Manchester, New York where Joseph Smith obtained the gold plates from which the Book of Mormon was translated. As we all know Ramah, NM was settled by the Mormons and they were the ones who originally coined our neighboring town. According to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints Institute of Religion at the University of Arizona the pronunciation is raw'-maw.

Conclusion: It really doesn't matter whether you want to say raw'-maw, or raw-maw', or ra'-maw or ra-maw' as was pointed out to me gently by our esteemed web site mentor. The "locals" determine the "official" general rule for how to pronounce a place name. This is an old universal rule and isn't violated. I guess its tomato; after all I'm just the new kid on the block. :

3a8082e126