German Pronunciation

Die fehlerhafte Aussprache des Buchstaben a im Englischen

I totally agree with the contention that many if not most native German speakers do the pronunciation of the English a sad injustice. I am not certain as to how intentional this is but rather suspect that many just do not hear or appreciate the phonic and phonetic differences.

In previous decades one might have smugly asserted that Germans were just not congenitally disposed to producing specific sounds in English. Beyond this discussion of the letter 'a' just think of words beginning with 'wh' even in North America the great unwashed i.e. tv generation, leave out the hint of an aspirant 'h' in words like 'what' which then sound like 'wott'.

But before my British-born teaching colleagues in Germany feel either to smug or too exasperated, let them try a few humbling exercises and exclaim that they are 'ueberglueckt' and 'ueberrascht' and then thank their ears or their good fortune if they do not sound like a Saxonian, as in 'Sachsen' not 'Angelsachsen'! coal-miner of old sounding like 'ieberglickt' and 'ieberr o ascht'.

Kidding aside, keep up the good work. When I trained teachers in Toronto, I noticed that a number of Scots found it extremely challenging to adopt an acceptably understandable form of English. By that I mean anything ranging from BBC English to cultured North American. No, the latter is not a contradiction of terms, I wonder why that is so?

Pronunciation Difficulties of Germans a la EL Gore

Further to the assertion of Sturheit of educated Germans who should know better to persist with Germenglish pronunciations is the memory that a reputed German Woerterbuch publisher assume it to be Langenscheidt deliberately persisted in pre-World War 2 times of making up some strange phonetic pronunciations. The word cut which thousands of Germans consequently pronounced as koett and in derivatives to this day as Koetteweh. Did you guess it? This last cut really hurts weh because Koetteweh the not so primly pronounced cutaway as in formal wear.

Bringing the disregard of the English language to the Abendbrot table many Germans still open a cooled can of Kornett-Beff to have with their Schwarzbrot-Schnitte. You ve guessed it, it's many Germans' pronunciation of Corned Beef largely because Oma who never took a single English class in her days used to pronounce it that way and bad habits are hard to break.

Alan Joachim Nanders, Ontario, Canada
A semi-retired high school teacher with accentless German and excellent North American English.

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