So how do you pronounce it! I’ve been saying “Jagd”. Just imagine me saying “Jagged” but without the “e” pronunciation. At my LHS today, one of the old timers said it’s said it’s pronounced “yagd”. I suppose that makes sense as Jäger is pronounced “yayger”.
In most European languages the “J” is pronounced like an English “Y” (as a consonant- remember in English Y swings both ways, vowel and consonent) so Jagdpanzer is pronounced Yagdpanzer.[;)] Then of course there is the umelat thing… the double dots over a vowel, makeing them long vowels in English…
Yup, it’s always been with the “Y” sound to me as well.
Then yagd it is! So jagdpanther would be pronounced “yagd-pan-ter”. I hear there is no th sound in german.
Don’t forget, a German ‘w’ is pronounced like a ‘v’. And a German ‘v’ is sometimes pronounced like an ‘f’. And the letter ‘s’ is pronounced like a ‘z’ but only if it is found at the beginning of a syllable. And the German ‘z’ is pronounced like ‘ts’. Aw, heck with it.
Well and then theres the fact that natives of Michigan don’t sound like natives of Mississippi. Either would be prone to find the other incomprehensible.
My version sounds like “Yawkt”
It reminds me of a “Family Feud” greatest moment.
The host asked: “Name a man’s name that begins with the letter H”
Contestant hits the buzzer and yells “Jose”
The schoolbook (or tv reporter) ways is: Yahgd" only with the trailing “d” sound bitten off into a t, but not enough to sound like a t.
Jagd and Jäger are both from the same German word, Wew could even say “Ein Jäger jagd.” (A hunter hunts.)
You are quite correct, Jagdpanther is “Yahgd’PANT’ehr”) Panzerjäger is " The truPANZ ehr YAY ge." The truppen (truh PEN) hauling a PAK for that task would know it as a “PANZ er ahb WHER KAHN own en” if recited in full; else it would be “Pah Ah kah.” Unless it wer a FLAK 35, which would be ein “FLAHk DRY SECS” as 3-6 is shorter to say than sechs und dreißig (sex oond’ DRY sig).
Germans can be flexible with their abreveiations, too. The television set is abreviated “TV” and even called “Tea VEE” desipite the German being “teh fowh”; that’s because the proper German nae is fehrnzehnapparat, or far-seeing machine.
Oh, and you have to be careful with the vowel dipthongs; in German they all have umlauts–äe, ëo, etc. These tend to follow Grecco-roamn roots and (sorta) correspond to æ and œ and the like.
Edit to add" it’s Tah MEE yah, and hah-say Jeh wa
and all the vertbs tend to stack up at the end of the sentence. OTOH what you see is how you pronounce it even if it is 28 letters long. there is no to, too, two auf Deutsch
That is funny. In Detroit a ford is a car. In Baltimore, it’s the region of your face above your eyebrows. The car is a ferd.
I learned my German when I lived in Denmark. Holstein accent. When I went to Bavaria they looked at each other and said “what the hell is this guy trying to say?”.
HA!!!
I took German for many years and the way people at the local hobby store say some of the names are hillarious.
-Wehrmacht “Where-match’t”
-Jagpanzer “Jay-guh-duh panzer”
-Sturmtiger “Strum (like stumming a guitar) Tiger”
-The most debated one… Italeri- “It-tah-larry-uh” “It-uh-larry” “Eye-tal-erie” Italy-air-eee-uh" and more. I dont even know. I have heard people swear up and down that in Italy it would be “It-Uh-Larry”. IDK No comprede on Italian.
-and my favorite “Luftwaffel”
Granted I know they havent ever taken or spoken German but it still throw up red flags when I hear it. LOL
Reminds me of an evening playing trivial pursuit many years back… of course that game is more fun when there are adult beverages involved, so at one point in the game my friend is given the question to “name the famous Japanese monster of a 1954 movie… of course having had his fair share of the refreshing beverages he replies most excitedly, " Oh I know that one- it’s Gonzalez!”
He never really lived that one down…
My mother in law, whose parents were from there, called it “Ittly”.
And when we went to “Ittly” to her parents town, the first guy I asked for directions told me “non parle Italiano”. The old people spoke Croatian there.
Language is funny. We take it for granted that every one understands each other in a politically defined country, but it’s not always true and certainly was not 100 years ago.
I’ve never asked a German to repeat either the words Tiger or Panther, and I’d expect them to speak it phonetically if they didn’t already have it in their vocabulary. I’m sure they all would now. My dyslexic daughter will always pronounce “th” as voiced, as in “the”, even for a word with an unvoiced “th” like “thank”.
That’s funny too.
It’s been a long time since I took the one German course I ever took in college. But my recollection is that “J” was pronounced like “Y” with a barely perceptible “H” in front of it: “hya.” And “Z” was pronounced like a hard “S” with a “T” in front of it. I remember the professor saying the sound was found at the beginning of one English word: “tsetse fly.”
So Jagdpanzer would be pronounced (more or less) “HYAGpantser.”
Another odd thing about transliterations is that most of the Russian words we read were originally transliterated into German - with German pronunciations. My favorite example is a well-known Russian composer. German doesn’t normally use the “CH” sound; the closest thing to it is “TSCH.” The closest German can come to our long “I” sound is “AI.” “K” is prounced the same in both languages. In German, “V” is pronounced like we pronounce “F.” So the composer’s name is usually spelled “Tschaikovsky.” I’ve seen it (very rarely - but in a book by Leonard Bernstein, no less) spelled “Chikofsky,” which is more-or-less how it’s pronounced.
It’s good to remember that of the major western languages, the one with the most irrational and inconsistent pronunciations and spellings is good ol’ English - especially the American variety.
It was perhaps even more debatable in the old spelling - Italerei [:D]
I think it changed in the late 70’s or early 80’s. My best guess would be ee*-tal-air-ay*
Italaerie, having to do with Italian Aircraft. A good version, based on the very little Italian I know, is a soft i, as in “it”, followed by tall-airy.
For us English speakers, think of “Jagd” as “yahkt”
As others have noted, German uses “j” for the sound of consonantal Y in English (Y as a consonant). It’s not aspirated, either, as was suggested, there’s no “H” sound before it. It is never pronounced like the soft “j” in English, unless where it appears in a word of foreign origin, and even then, the tendency was to spell the world using German phonetics. So, “jungle” was spelled “Dschungel”, because that’s how it sounded to German ears.
“A” in German is pronounced like the “a” in “father”, not like what we call “short A” in “cat” or “bad” (that’s represented better by “A-umlaut”)
“G” in German is always the hard sound, as in English “gate” or “game”, and never soft, except in words of foreign origins, and even then, if it’s the first letter, it’s not soft–as in “Garage” for example, (except to the Bavarians, when the affect airs by pronouncing words with a French accent–geology, for example, in Hochdeutsch, is “gay-o-lo-gee”, both g’s are hard. But the Bavarians had close ties to the French for a long time, and so some folks affected to pronounce it “Shay-o-lo-shee”. But I think that affectation went out of fashion by the First World War. Still, they refer to the ground floor of a building as the Parterre, among other signs of the influence of French).
And “D” on the end of a word is normally pronounced very hard, as “dt”
Hmmm, always thought Jagd was pronounced as TAR-GET…
LOL! I believe that’s actually how you pronounce M4 Sherman! (That’s a joke guys, so nobody needs to make a snide remark or comment about it.)