German Word-of-the-Day for Owlet: Day 1

[muckefuck]

heute /'hOY.t@/ "today"

This may not look anything like der Tag "day", but that only goes to show you what a thousand years of phonetic erosion can do to a word. The Old High German form is hiu tagu, "this day" in the long-vanished instrumental case (and with an obsolete form of the demonstrative). There were parallel formations with die Nacht "night" and das Jahr "year", but nowadays heint and heuer are basically restricted to the Upper German dialects of the southeast. For "tonight", the modern standard uses the collocation heute Nacht (or heute Abend if you mean the period before bedtime).

English gets a lot of credit for freely shifting words from one part of speech to another, but one area where German has the drop on it is in forming adjectives from time adverbs. From heute you get heutig "contemporary, present-day". For instance, bis zum heutigen Tag "up to the present day". (Heuer does this, too, of course, giving us the Austrian dialect word der Heurige for newly-bottled wine or the establishments which sell it.) Heute also has restricted use as a noun in the phrase von heute "of today; today's".

To say "a week from today", you have a choice between the familiar heute in einer Woche and the more puzzling heute in acht Tagen "today in eight days". Heute also appears somewhat unexpectedly in the conventional ending to a fairy tale: und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind, dann leben sie noch heute, lit. "and if they haven't died, then they live still today".

Comments

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

1. Is this what's going on in the second word of the brand name "Tag Heuer"?

2. In the final phrase of the post, how does one tell the difference between hard and soft "ch"?

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

RE point 2: hard vs. soft is consistent in all usages that I can think of (except when there's an s along for the ride, at which point it's a sh instead of the soft guttural or k), and it's dictated purely by regional accent. I have a northern accent, so they're all soft.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Um...not exactly. In the standard language, the quality of <ch> is determined by the preceding vowel. "Soft" <ch> is called der Ich-Laut. This is the sound that <ch> has after front vowels: /i/, /I/, /e/, /E/, /2/, /9/, and /@/. The "hard" <ch> or der Ach-Laut is found after the remaining vowels, i.e. /a/, /O/, /o/, /U/, /u/.

The Ich-Laut is also found after most consonants, e.g. durch, die Milch, ein bisschen. (The last of these is an example of the diminutive ending -chen which I discussed in an earlier post. It's something of a problem for the analysis, because the <ch> here is always soft, no matter what vowel comes before it.) Initial <ch> is something of a free-for-all: Borrowed words (e.g. China, die Chirugie) tend to have Ich-Laut in the south, /k/ in the north. Die Chuzpe is the most common example of initial Ach-Laut and das Charisma allows all three possibilities.

As lil_m_moses says, there is a fair bit of regional variation, but I'm teaching you the prescriptivist standard with just a faint bit of colouring from my southwestern accent.

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

What's the relationship of ich to the Welsh ll?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Not close at all. Both sounds are voiceless (i.e. made without vibration of the vocal chords) and fricative (i.e. the air flow is continuous, but not as smooth as for a liquid, let alone a vowel).

However, the Ich-Laut (IPA [ç]) is palatal; that is, the contact is with the soft palate. It's close to yod (IPA [j]), but voiceless and with more friction. The best way I know to approximate it is to say the name "Hugh". The /h/ and the yod of the vowel nucleus blend together to form a voiceless palatal glide. Give it a little more friction and you have [ç].

Welsh <ll> (IPA [ɬ]) is a lateral. It's hard to define lateral consonants beyond saying that they are "l-like sounds". The way to approximate this sound is to devoice a regular <l> (e.g. by trying to say /hl/) and add friction. With [l], air flows past on both sides of the tongue, but usually only on one side or the other when [ɬ] is involved.

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

At last! Something of German is perfectly clear to me!

[keyne.livejournal.com]

With [l], air flows past on both sides of the tongue, but usually only on one side or the other when [ɬ] is involved.

Huh. Maybe I've been saying "ll" wrong all these years; I generally emphasize it enough that air flows past on both sides. (Then again, trying it several times, I seem to vary randomly between one side and both....)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Do you get spit on your conversational partner when you say it?

[pne.livejournal.com]

[-chen is] something of a problem for the analysis, because the <ch> here is always soft, no matter what vowel comes before it.

OTOH, -chen nearly always puts umlaut on the preceding syllable - and an umlauted vowel is never a back vowel, i.e. one that would trigger Ach-Laut.

Problems arise when -chen doesn't put umlaut on the preceding syllable; in my idiolect, I can think of only one such word. (The umlauting behaviour is, in general, productive, as far as I can tell.)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

It's actually "TAG Heuer". The first part isn't German at all by an acronym for "Techniques d'Avant Garde", a Swiss concern which in 1985 merged with the Heuer Group to form the modern company.