German pronounciation

Benquasha   Fri Jun 16, 2006 3:23 pm GMT
Hey. Can anyone here help me? How do you pronounce "Ich"

Is it "Ick" or "Ish" or something in the middle?
Vladimir   Fri Jun 16, 2006 3:32 pm GMT
Eastern German: ch = [h] as in “here”.
Southern German ch = [sh]
The first version is a German "standard".

All this is my personal opinion and must be confirmed by German speaking people. I don’t speak German.
Benjamin   Fri Jun 16, 2006 3:34 pm GMT
Say the name 'Hugh' in English. Take the 'H' sound from the beginning, and that's basically the sound found in the German 'ich' in Standard German.
JakubikF   Fri Jun 16, 2006 10:08 pm GMT
I think you're wrong... it isn't the same sound like in english word "hugh"! I think it is hardly possible to tell how really this sound is. The best way is to hear native speaker speaking "Hochdeutsch" and then you will have the answer.
Benjamin   Fri Jun 16, 2006 10:53 pm GMT
I think you misunderstand me. The best way, and I've seen this repeated several times, to describe the sound to English speakers is that it's similar to the initial 'H' sound in 'Hugh' or 'huge', because that's the closest sound which exists in Standard English. It isn't exactly the same though.
Ed   Sat Jun 17, 2006 1:00 am GMT
I've always assumed the CH in German 'Ich' was pronounced the same as the G in Afrikaans words like nege (nine). Certainly this was how I pronounced it when I learned German at school and my teacher never corrected me. It is a gutteral sound that does not exist in standard English and is usually replaced by an H sound by those who cannot say it.
Fredrik from Norway   Sun Jun 18, 2006 1:13 pm GMT
The consonant in "ich" is the voiceless palatal fricative, which is /ç/ in IPA and /C/ in X-Sampa.

Wikipedia says:
Features of the voiceless palatal fricative:
Its manner of articulation is fricative, which means it is produced by constricting air flow through a narrow channel at the place of articulation, causing turbulence.
Its place of articulation is palatal which means it is articulated with the middle or back part of the tongue raised against the hard palate.
Its phonation type is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords.
It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth.
It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by allowing the airstream to flow over the middle of the tongue, rather than the sides.
The airstream mechanism is pulmonic egressive, which means it is articulated by pushing air out of the lungs and through the vocal tract, rather than from the glottis or the mouth.

The voiceless palatal fricative in English:
In some dialects of English, the sequence /hj/ is sometimes realized as the voiceless palatal fricative, via coalescence, a type of assimilation. For example, human (/ˈhjumən/ might be realized as [ˈçumən]). However, there are no minimal pairs for /hj/ and /ç/, so the voiceless palatal fricative is not a separate phoneme in English.

And in German:
German features the sound in words like ich [ɪç] "I" and is often referred to as ich-Laut and is generally an allophone of the /x/ when it follows a front vowel. [ç] can be found in a few words where [x] would be expected, such as Frauchen [ˈfraʊçən] "diminutive of woman", and so is marginally phonemic.

In my opinion, those who are learning German and are not able to pronounce the ch, should consider North German /ik/, South German /isch/ or Swiss German /ix/, instead of making some strange strangling noise.
Kuni   Sun Jun 18, 2006 6:30 pm GMT
Hej Fredrik,

does this sound also appear in the Norwegian language? Somebody told me recently that there is a similar (or even the same) sound in Swedish, for example in "kjol". So, I thought it's maybe the same with the other scandinavian languages....
Vladimir   Sun Jun 18, 2006 7:22 pm GMT
Fredrik from Norway
>> The consonant in "ich" is the voiceless palatal fricative etc.etc.

Is “ich” worth to write theses ? I think that the following question is more interesting. In what languages does this (voiceless palatal fricative) sound exist ?
German: yes Ich
Russian: yes Х..
Arab: yes. TODO: give an example
French: No
English: in weak form
Swedish : yes
Others: ???

My conjecture is that any language that posses this “voiceless palatal fricative” has a more large overall phonetic spectrum then any other language that doesn’t posses it.
Gwyn   Sun Jun 18, 2006 11:22 pm GMT
So is the 'ch' sound in 'ich' like the 'ch' sound in welsh?
Guest   Mon Jun 19, 2006 7:10 am GMT
-So is the 'ch' sound in 'ich' like the 'ch' sound in welsh?-

No. I think you mean the ach-sound that also appears in Scots, like in 'loch'.
Ed   Mon Jun 19, 2006 3:18 pm GMT
This is how I'd pronounce it: http://www.sois.uwm.edu/jacques/afrikaans/pron/twist/g-hard.MP3. I think the actual German pronuciation can be slightly different, but I think it is close enough. I any case, my German teacher never corrected me.
Fredrik from Norway   Mon Jun 19, 2006 9:29 pm GMT
Kuni:
Yes, Norwegian (as well as Swedish) has also got the voiceless palatal fricative, in words like "kjole" (= dress), "kjøre" (= drive), "kirke" (= church in Bokmål) and "kyrkje" (= church in Nynorsk).
As you see it can be written both -kj, -ki and -ky.

An interesting thing is that the voiceless palatal fricative is disappearing from many Norwegian dialects right now and it is being replaced with the voiceless postalveolar fricative, /sh/. Earlier, this was considered a speech failure, especially among children, but is now gaining ground among many youngsters. I do it myself, pronouncing "kino" (= cinema) as /shi:nu/ and not /çi:nu/, like my parents.

An extreme case of this shound shift is people saying /sji:nu/, but this is less common.
Kuni   Tue Jun 20, 2006 9:33 am GMT
<<An interesting thing is that the voiceless palatal fricative is disappearing from many Norwegian dialects right now and it is being replaced with the voiceless postalveolar fricative, /sh/.>>

Ah, I see. Very interesting! It's just like in Southern Germany where people also don't pronounce this sound and prefer using /sh/ instead, but you already pointed this out...
But what about the danish language? Is there also a sound like this?
Fredrik from Norway   Tue Jun 20, 2006 8:59 pm GMT
I don't think Danish has got the voiceless palatal fricative, as they pronounce "kirke" etc. with /k/, just as it was done in Old Norse.
I think a word like "kjole" would be pronounced /kjule/ in Danish, with k and j being separate sounds. Or perhaps this is sound that Wikipedia describes as "the combination of /sj/ is realized as a alveolo-palatal fricative, [ɕ], making it possible to postulate a tentative /ɕ/-phoneme in Danish."

Wikipedia also writes that this phoneme also appears in Swedish "kjol" and that it is used instead of the Ich-Laut (voiceless palatal fricative) in Rhineland in Germany.