German group

An area with study groups for various languages. Group members help each other, share resources and experience. Study groups are permanent but the members rotate and change.
DaveAgain
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Re: German group

Postby DaveAgain » Sun Apr 24, 2022 1:52 pm

I'm currently reading Tomi Ungerer's account of his childhood in Alsace. One book he mentions the family reading aloud from in the evenings is the Ludwig Richter Hausbuch.
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Le Baron
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Re: German group

Postby Le Baron » Sun Apr 24, 2022 6:12 pm

DaveAgain wrote:I'm currently reading Tomi Ungerer's account of his childhood in Alsace. One book he mentions the family reading aloud from in the evenings is the Ludwig Richter Hausbuch.

It's been a while since I've read anything using 'fraktur'. It always starts off feeling overwhelming, especially large blocks of text, but then you settle into it. Purely visually it's an arresting script. I just read a few poems out of that book.
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Iversen
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Re: German group

Postby Iversen » Sun Apr 24, 2022 6:56 pm

I just remembered that I had a German book in Fraktur at the backside of my bookshelves - I think I bought it from an antiquarian bookshop in the 80s and then forgot all about it. It's apparently written by somebody named Klabund (pen name?) and deals with the character Till Eulenspiegel, built on a character named Dyl Uylenspegel in a book from 1515. I have listened many times to the homonyme symphonic poem by Richard Strauß (splendid work!), but never read the book on my shelf, let alone the original text in Mittelniederdeutsch.

So I opened it on a random page and found that I could read the text, it just went slightly slower than things written in a modern font. But just yesterday my sister, who is quite interested in genealogy, showed me her name and my name written with a fraktur font in its italic form on her phone, and I noticed that the 'i' in our surname looked totally like a majuscule 'J' - things like that would make it quite hard to read a text that used this font. And Gothic handwriting is definitely outside my comfort zone ...

Till Eulenspiegel.jpg
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jeff_lindqvist
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Re: German group

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Sun Apr 24, 2022 8:00 pm

Iversen wrote:(...)and I noticed that the 'i' in our surname looked totally like a majuscule 'J' - things like that would make it quite hard to read a text that used this font.


I've seen older generations write I as J, and J as J with a line. As long as there is consistency.
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tractor
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Re: German group

Postby tractor » Sun Apr 24, 2022 8:34 pm

Iversen wrote:It's apparently written by somebody named Klabund (pen name?)

His real name is Alfred Henschke. I happend to read a short story (”Der Bär“) by him earlier today, and that’s how I know it.
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Iversen
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Re: German group

Postby Iversen » Sun Apr 24, 2022 11:43 pm

tractor wrote:
Iversen wrote:It's apparently written by somebody named Klabund (pen name?)

His real name is Alfred Henschke. I happend to read a short story (”Der Bär“) by him earlier today, and that’s how I know it.


Weird coincidence - I find an old book at the back of my bookshelves, and Tractor has just read a short story by this otherwise totally forgotten author ....

As for the i's and j's: in the 19. century many names that today were written with a J were written with an I - like for instance the composer I.P.E. Hartmann, whose full name was Iens (Jens) Peter Emilius Hartmann. But the thing that I found puzzling about the font my sister showed me was that a I (as in Iversen) looked like a J.
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tractor
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Re: German group

Postby tractor » Wed Apr 27, 2022 9:19 pm

Did the Is and the Js look exactly the same in that font?
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Le Baron
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Re: German group

Postby Le Baron » Sun May 01, 2022 9:40 pm

Eine Erinnerung daran (falls es nötig ist), dass man sich manchmal sogar nicht integrieren kann, selbst wenn man dieselbe Muttersprache hat.

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Re: German group

Postby Kraut » Sun May 01, 2022 10:54 pm

Le Baron wrote:Eine Erinnerung daran (falls es nötig ist), dass man sich manchmal sogar nicht integrieren kann, selbst wenn man dieselbe Muttersprache hat.



It's not the same language, I myself feel a certain distance towards nothern Germans based on their speech. There is a couple of street interviews with Swiss Germans, do you understand their language?

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlVjnV_XHyk
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Le Baron
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Re: German group

Postby Le Baron » Sun May 01, 2022 11:15 pm

Kraut wrote:t's not the same language, I myself feel a certain distance towards nothern Germans based on their speech. There is a couple of street interviews with Swiss Germans, do you understand their language?


I know it isn't the same language, although Swiss people can speak a more regular German when they want/need to. I've done it there. Though to be honest most of the hotel staff tend to be from Eastern Europe and spoke English to me!

I don't understand Swiss German properly. I think I was in a discussion about this here previously. It sounds like a Swedish person speaking German.
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