Re: CHAT: Being taken for a furriner ...

On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 20:54:24 +0200, =?iso-8859-1?q?Steven=20Williams?=
<feurieaux@...> wrote:

>In a conversation with a German friend of mine, she
>made the remark that I sounded very Bavarian. For
>background purposes, my native accent is standard
>(i.e., 'Midwestern') American, leaning a bit towards
>Southern, thanks to all but five months of my life
>being spent in the South.
Maybe any strange German accent would have sounded Bavarian to her?

>Anyways, she made that remark after laughing at my
>saying something like "Draussen ist sehr heiß ,
>nicht?" ("It's very hot out, isn't it?"). I'm pretty
>sure she was laughing at me using 'nicht' to mark tag
>questions. Tell me, are tag questions particularly
>Bavarian?
Not at all! It's common to tag-question with "nicht" (the "t" usually
dropped which doesn't occur in other words ending on "cht"). There's even a
kind of tag particle in Southern German, "gell", which is originally a verb
form related to "gelten", which can still be seen by the use of it's plural
form in southwestern dialect: "gellet", which is used when adressing groups
or as honorific (either third or second person plural).

>He used articles with proper names, which I find
>awesomely cool, if a bit comical. I'd use them myself,
>if I felt brave enough.
In German, that is? It's considered to be a southern regionalism, and maybe
northern speakers consider it to be vulgar.

g_0ry@_ˆs:
j. 'mach' wust

Replies