Well, it's an interesting question, shufitz. I'VE always pronounced "bitter envy..."

Perhaps an equivalent question should be

a) 'fate' sound and 'froyd'
b) 'fate' sound and 'froy-deh'
c) 'father' sound and 'froyd'
d) Did you ever learn to speak any German?

PS I thought we were pronouncing it "eh-pih-CARE-ih-kuh-see" !

[Edited to correct typo. Rats.]

This message has been edited. Last edited by: haberdasher,

Ahhhh, 7 people for the fourth one? I believe that like I believe the Pope is Jewish!

I remember jheem's skepticism about our Balderdash game. I am a skeptic here. I have never heard it pronounced "froy-deh."

Quote "...I am a skeptic here. I have never heard it pronounced "froy-deh."..."

Indeed. In the same way that you've probably never hear Porsche pronounced "porsher" - but that's the way that Dr Porsche pronounced his name and the car firm he founded is pronounced the same way.

And yes, I did learn German which I how I know. And the fact that most people get the pronunciation wrong doesn't make the wrong pronunciation right!

You can here the word correctly pronounced here http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=schadenfreude (albeit it with an American accent)

"And the fact that most people get the pronunciation wrong doesn't make the wrong pronunciation right!"

A bit perscriptivist, aren't we?

It is an interesting issue precisely when a new pronunciation or meaning (or word) has become sufficiently accepted to be "correct". But surely there are no immutable platonic ideals of "correctness".

I agree that pronunciation, like word use itself will change. But Schadenfreude is a relatively new import into English and I think we should allow the Germans the right to decree how their own words should be pronounced.

I will accept, though, that to capitalise it (as I have done and as is correct in German) is probably being too pedantic when transliterating it into English.

And the fact that most people get the pronunciation wrong doesn't make the wrong pronunciation right!

I surely didn't mean to imply that. My comment comes from hearing people say the word, though, granted, I have never heard a Brit use it. I suppose the intellectual level of the people I know is lower than those on this board. That probably is true, in fact...at least regarding pronunction of words.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kalleh,

quote: "I think we should allow the Germans the right to decree how their own words should be pronounced."

Just as the French and Germans do with their imports of our words?

[Leaving aside the troubling concept of a "German right to decree". ] What you suggest is hardly the prevalent practice for new importations.

Of course it's FROY-de. What else could it be? How do you pronounce the first word of the choral verse of Beethoven's Ninth? Not like the name of the Viennese psychiatrist!

Of course it's FROY-de. What else could it be?
Hab, I have only heard it pronounced "froyd."

quote:

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Originally posted by Kalleh:
Of course it's FROY-de. What else could it be?
Hab, I have only heard it pronounced "froyd."

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Interesting.
I've only ever heard it pronounced as the fourth option, and strangely, in spite of speaking German, I've never actually heard a German use the word at all.

Quote "...What you suggest is hardly the prevalent practice for new importations...."

This might again be a US/UK difference. I have never heard anyone pronounce Schadenfreude other than phonetically (and with pure vowels, not dipthongs)

I have never heard anyone pronounce Schadenfreude other than phonetically (and with pure vowels, not dipthongs)

Uh, Richard, Schadenfreude is pronounced in German with a diphthong /oy/ and two vowels /A/ and /@/.

I agree that this is the case but I learnt (maybe wrongly) the it is primarily English where a dipthong can be represented by just one letter. For example, "cake"; "bike"; "angina"; "joke".

Other languages use two or more adjacent vowels to create a dipthong effect and might write the above words as "caek"; "baek"; "angiena"; "jouk".

Thus the Germans use both e and u to make the "oy" sound.

Me: "...What you suggest is hardly the prevalent practice for new importations...."
RE: "This might again be a US/UK difference."

I'm sorry; I spoke ambiguously, and you misunderstood. My point was that when the French import an English word, they use it with a Frenchified pronunciation, not an English one. Their pattern (and the German pattern too, I believe) is that an imported foreign word takes on the pronunciation of the importing language, not of the exporting language.

I agree that this is the case but I learnt (maybe wrongly) the it is primarily English where a dipthong can be represented by just one letter. For example, "cake"; "bike"; "angina"; "joke".

Well, a diphthong is a diphthong no matter how many letters it takes to represent it. Now I will spend the rest of the day trying to come up with examples in other languages. Thanks.

Quote "...Their pattern (and the German pattern too, I believe) is that an imported foreign word takes on the pronunciation of the importing language, not of the exporting language....

I agree that this is probably what often happens but I suggest it will to some extent depend on the word. Beacuse English is a very casual language, foreign words are often pronounced in the foreign manner. We are so used to the indiosyncrasies of English pronunciation and spelling that we often don't even consider it strange.

Beacuse Schadenfreude is not even yet an English word, I think it's right to pronounce it as the Germans would pronounce it - and there's no reason why we shouldn't. It breaks no rules of English pronunciation to sound a terminal "e".

Here is how I pronounce it. Wait, I don't think I've ever actually said this word. Read it many times, and heard it a few.

Sorry for the poor description of pronunction, a year with no linguistics and I forget how to write things in IPA.

Show- as in Shower
Din- as in noisy
Frod- rhymes with head-Nod

The poll result shows the most popular pronunciation and that is the way the Germans pronounce the word. As do I.

The poll result shows the most popular pronunciation and that is the way the Germans pronounce the word.

Unless, of course, there has been some cheating!

quote:

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Originally posted by Kalleh:
The poll result shows the most popular pronunciation and that is the way the Germans pronounce the word.

Unless, of course, there has been some cheating!

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You've been hanging around here for too long. There was a time when such a suspicious notion would never have entered your head.

I believe the results of the poll, especially if most of the Brits have answered as a series of television adverts that used the word (selling cars I believe) have firmly embedded the German pronunciation into the British mind.

Kalleh says, "The poll result shows the most popular pronunciation and that is [with the freude part as two syllables rather than one]. Unless, of course, there has been some cheating!"
Bob says, "You've been hanging around here for too long. There was a time when such a suspicious notion would never have entered your head."

Well, Bob, I'm not so sure. Maybe not 'cheating', but the experience I'm about to describe makes me wonder if perhaps this is an instance where the merely asking the question influences the answer - a psychological equivalent of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, if you will.

I personally use the one-syllable pronunciation of the last part of the 'freude' in 'schadenfreude' - not to say that I'm right, but that I do - and I wrote a limerick based on that my pronunciation. It rhymed schadenfreude with overjoyed and were deployed.

Want a word which we wish were deployed?
We all would be quite overjoyed
Someday to see
'Epicaricacy'
Replacing that beast, 'schadenfreude'.

The limerick simply would not work with the the 'freude' pronounced as two syllables, 'freu-de'. Interestingly, no one called me on it when the limerick was posted. So it seems that even those who say sha-den-freud-de (or say that they do) do not find sha-den-freud offensive to their poetic ears.

Hmmm, Hab reminded me (in a PM) that the first word of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is "Freude," of course pronounced "FROY-de." I adore Beethoven's Ninth, but never really listened to the German since I don't speak German.

Now, I won't be able to say it any other way!

Reviving a thread...

Just when I thought we had this subject resolved, I get a new book ("In Other Words" by Christopher Moore)...an excellent one...that says this is how you pronounce "Schadenfreude:"

shar-den-froi-da

"Shar?" Is that the way you Brits and Easterners pronounce it? I mean, I know you say "idear."

The -ar is not so much a vowel plus an r, as it it is an indication of how some pronounce the vowel.

shar is a less helpful guide than the homophone shah, because it only works in dialects for which they are homophones, i.e. the r is silent. An equally poor American equivalent would be writing it as shaw, which only works for dialects in which shaw and shah are homophones and is misleading to the rest of us.

In the case of this particular vowel we have the unambiguous respelling ah available, and don't need to use misleading alternatives like ar, aw, o.

We don't say idear, we say idea without an [r]. But all words ending in vowels take a linking consonant when followed by another vowel. With the a, ah, aw vowels the linking consonant used is [r]: idea[r]of it, car[r]engine, law[r]office, fire[r]and smoke.

Probably the most difficult part of Schadenfreude for English speakers to pronounce is the "r" in Freude. Much as do the French, the Germans "swallow" their Rs.

In fact, I think that the pronunciation of "R" is one of the most distinguishing features of many languages. In English we sound the "R" at the front of our mouths - though not so far forward as the Spanish who often trill theirs.

In French the "R" is just a scrape at the back of the throat and German is similar although it tends to be sounded slightly more but still very much at the back of the throat.

Much as do the French, the Germans "swallow" their Rs.

Not all dialects of German have the voiced uvular fricative /ʁ/: for instance in Switzerland, an alveolar trill is used. See uvular r.

I've always heard that swallowing is more ladylike than spitting.

I don't think I've ever heard Swiss German. I learnt mine from a fairly high-borne Viennese lady and I've been told I have a very classy German accent. Certainly she used this "uvular fricative" (although I never knew that's what it was called)

quote:

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In French the "R" is just a scrape at the back of the throat

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You know, I used to think that too, but recently I've concluded that it is a back-throat r + a simultaneous tip-of-the-tongue r (I can see jheem wincing...those two e's squinching down...) and that we tend to hear just the throat part. I think this is the secret to 'roi'.

You know, I think you're right and I hadn't spotted this previously. In fact, I suspect there might be a difference between an "r" when it's the first letter of a word and when it's not.

The tongue touch is possibly needed in "Roi" because the "R" is the initial letter whereas when the "r" is used as in "formidable" it might not happen.

ut recently I've concluded that it is a back-throat r + a simultaneous tip-of-the-tongue r

Sorry, but that's not how I've seen the standard French r described (the co-articulation tap part that is). I'll take a look at some of my phonology books and see. There is a lot of dialectal variation of the French r. In fact, Parisians pronounce it as a uvular trill /ʀ/. Further south, it's an alveolar trill.

One of the few talents I have is that of mimicry - and thus pronunciation. It is not a subject I have studied and I know nothing of the various conventions for indicating sounds.

However, as soon as I realised that different people's voices sounded different I started to imitate their ways of speech and didn't realise that there was anything unusual about being able to it.

However, when I started to learn French (at the age of eleven) I just said the words as the French master said them, giving no thought to what I was doing. To my embarrassment, after just a couple of lessons Mr James, our French master asked me to stand in front of the class and read a passage, which I did, to the smirks and grins of my classmates. Mr. James was a kindly man but it didn't really help when he said, as I finished, "...what are you all smirking at - just because you've heard French being spoken properly for the first time in your silly lives..."

Sadly, I didn't really recognise my talent for what it was and was not popular at school since the talent that my contemporaries valued was that of ball use. If I try to throw a ball the only thing I can be sure it will hit is the ground. Had I realised that this talent, gift, call it what you will, was not all that common I would maybe have chosen a different career as, perhaps, an actor.

Anyway, the point of my tale is that, until relatively recently in life I have never analysed the way I make sounds - I just make them and, when I pronounce foreign words I rarely need more than one or two attempts to get the pronunciation right. Sadly, my memory for the vocabulary itself does not match my ability to pronounce it and so I can sometimes get into trouble as when, in Cairo, I used the Arabic greeting I had learnt and was greeted with a torrent of quite incomprehensible Arabic which, when it was translated for me, meant something like, "...Which part of Cairo were you brought up in...?". I had learnt my few words of Arabic from the barman on the Nile Steamer and he must have had a strong Cairo accent.

Anyway, back to French, if I analyse the way I say "Le Roi" I can now tell that my tongue is slightly rolled and moved slightly back from my teeth - where it was, of course, to sound the "L" i "Le". In "formidable" I leave my tongue rather further back since the "o" didn't need my tongue so far forward. The sounds of the two "rs", as I say them, is ever so slightly different.

Of course, it may be that I have a distinct regional French accent since I do not know what accent Mr James had. I am quite prepared to accept that there may be regional variations that I know not of.

it may be that I have a distinct regional French accent since I do not know what accent Mr James had. I am quite prepared to accept that there may be regional variations that I know not of.

I, too, am unable to say from experience whether Richard is correct in his analysis of the French "swallowed" r or not. I was just saying what I have read in linguistic analyses of French phonology. Since I will be in France in a fortnight, I'll be sure to make some observations of francophones in situ, and get back to you all. Also, this afternoon I am visiting a friend who used to teach phonetics at UC San Diego and who has studied French recently (in the South of France); I'll get his opinion on this.

On the other hand, I'd like to commend Richard for noticing something that very few laymen notice about the sounds of their own or other languages. The differences in pronounciation of sounds which seem to be psychologically (or orthographically) the same sound. For example, many people will tell you that the p in pot, spot, and top are all the same, when in fact they are different. (And these differences in other languages are great enough that they would indicate different sounds.

My two-contact R theory is just a theory so tell me if I'm nuts:
Try to mimic Jacques Brel singing 'chrysanthèmes' or "j'arrive" in the song "J'arrive", or the word 'jaures' in the song of the same name and tell me if it doesn't sound better with the tap compared to just a uvular r.

What you're hearing in Brel or Piaf is, I believe, the uvular roll. The uvula actually rolls, the way the tongue-tip rolls in an Italian [r]. So you can hear the distinct beat of it. Apart from the rolling effect, it is very similar acoustically to a sound made differently, the uvular fricative. In this the back of the tongue comes close enough to the uvula to cause a rough flow of air.

Probably historically the [r] sound went from a lingual (tongue-tip) roll to a uvular roll to the easier uvular fricative, which is the usual sound in French and German. The singers stand out because they use the less usual roll.

I have enough difficulty producing the uvular roll; I can't make a simultaneous lingual roll, but that doesn't mean it can't be done. However, I think what you're hearing is the beats of the roll, not an extra tongue-tip effect.

What a fabulous discussion. I have tried to produce a uvular roll, albeit it vain. However, I did have my dog running around the room as she thought somebody was growling!

Since I will be in France in a fortnight,

Jheem, you are definitely ready for your trip to England!

Ah Edith Piaf.

Now she did have a special sound when she said "r" (and it's still the "r" than makes it special, you'll note). He "r" was still well back but she growled it, a bit like a very soft cat sound. I doubt that her tongue was involved in the sound very much - quite unlike the Spanish trill.

Very difficult to do and certainly nothing like the normal French "r". Which was part of her uniqueness, of course.

quote:

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Originally posted by aput:
What you're hearing in Brel or Piaf is, I believe, the uvular roll

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That's the point: what we, as native English speakers, hear is the uvular roll, because it dominates, so when we try to imitate it that's what we do, but it never sounds quite right, because we're omitting the secret extra tongue-tip thing.

quote:

Originally posted by me:
How do you pronounce 'schadenfreude'?

Is the second part pronounced as one syllable ('froyd') or as two syllables ('froy-deh')?

Here in Chicago there may be a special factor at play. The local outlet of National Public Radio produces and airs a weekly show titled 'Schadenfreude,' by a local comedy ensemle of the same name. So a listener hears that name often. (Especially during this the annual pledge drive this week -- which is why it popped to mind just now!)

The ensemble pronounces its name 'shaden-froye.' Its site, http://www.schadenfreude.net/, says

scha·den·freu·de (shädn-froid) n.: 1. Pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others. 2. Chicago-based comedy ensemble

So the 'froyd' pronunciation is heard on the air here and becomes familiar to a listener's ears. Perhaps that's why I pronounce it that way, which is clearly a minority view on this site.

Many people mispronounce German words in this manner since,of course, the final "e" is usually silent in English.

That's why Germany's most famous sports car, the Porsche, is all to often referred to as a "Porsh" rather than being pronounced in almost exactly the same way as is the name of the heroine of The Merchant of Venice, Portia.

It has been awhile since we've talked about this word because there are a few on the board who are sick of those discussions. In advance, I apologize to those of you who are sick of it...

I just wanted to report that I've been waiting since 2004 to write an OEDILF limerick on "epicaricacy." The time has finally come! I sent it in tonight, though who knows what will happen to it.