Yes exactly, The Republic is less than 250 years old.

Another example is time zones. The four that cover the US and Canada came into use in 1883. Tankerbuilder was only three years old.

Prior to that, it was the county court house clock.

All of which is to say that this globalization thing is only about two or three generations old.

The word I recall most having different pronunciations due to regional dialects was "ich". In Hochdeutsch or "proper German" as I took for many years in school, it sounds like "eechh". In Bavarian IIRC, the c is softer and it sounds like "ish" as in dish. I have even heard it pronounced by Germans where it soulds like "ick" as in tick (nannybot survived the revamp- had to think of a word that would work). 

BlackSheepTwoOneFour

I've got a headache reading this thread! Between the proper pronunciation dispute of dee cale, deck alls, in another thread, and tam me a or tam my a for Tamiya, this takes the cake. LOL!

 

This, my friends, is why I build only American subjects.  LOL!  When I go into a hobby shop, I can pronounce "Revell" and "Monogram" and "Thunderbolt" and "Black Widow", etc...

Eric

oh guys this one is really gorgeous! I almost wet myself reading this one, sorry I´m German and maybe I can help you out.

the Y ist the best one, try it like this "yaagd"  like the beginning of yahoo then add the g from good and finish it with the t from wet. but it depends on who you are talking to and where you are in the moment, there is a great difference between north and south Germany... hope this one could help you out...

Thanks Jumo! Guess I've been pronouncing it about halfway correctly

stikpusher

...In Bavarian IIRC, the c is softer and it sounds like "ish" as in dish...

Not at all.  The Bavarians actually drop the closing consonant, and say "i" ("ee").  Same for "dich" (which corresponds to our archaic "thee", by the way), they drop the "ch".  "Ich liebe Dich", for example, they'd pronounce "I liab' Di"

But even this change is not consistent within Bairisch--"Euch", for example, 2nd person plural, keeps the "ch", but the vowel shifts to "ei"--"Eich", just like the High German word for "oak".  And then across the different regions where Bairisch is spoken, there are "upper" and "lower" flavors of the dialect, "upper" being southernmost, in the Alps and the Voralpenland, and "lower" being a little north of there.  Sometimes "Euch" becomes "Enk".

The soft "ch" (like English "sh") is more of a Rhenish dialect.

In the north, there it does become more equivalent to the "k", "ick" for "ich".

When I learned German, I found the dialects fascinating, because they are so much better preserved than our English dialects.  While there has been some levelling due to mass media, you can still find cases where someone from the Steiermark and someone from Flensburg on the Danish border may have a hard time understanding one another.

Bucksco

 

the Baron

 

Bucksco

The G is silent - pronounced "Yad"

 

 

 

Sorry, that is incorrect.  The "g" is most definitely pronounced.

And "Yad" would be Hebrew.

 

 

 I could be wrong but I've always heard it pronounced without the "G"

 

Was that non-native speakers of German you heard, especially Americans?  A native English speaker, with no knowledge of any foreign language, would tend to treat the "g" as silent.

"Yad" is Hebrew, by the way, as in "Yad Vashem", the memorial to Holocaust victims.  It's from Isiah, and translates to "a place and a name", meaning a memorial to those who had no families to remember them.

Reaper420

So how 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 Jäger is pronounced "yayger". 

 

I pronounce it "Ya-gd".