Hard German "ch" in other languages?

Factual Questions
1

Two questions really, one generic and one specific.

My wife and I were overseas having breakfast in a London hotel. There were some other diners, few speaking English. I was trying to guess what languages were being spoken. One family was conversing in a language I couldn’t make out.

I don’t speak German but I can generally recognize it. I don’t think they were speaking German. But they were using the hard, guttural “ch”, as in “Bach”, frequently. My limited exposure to languages didn’t lead me to any conclusion. In fact, I couldn’t think of too many other languages that use that sound, at least not a lot. Most Romance languages don’t, do they? Can anyone help?

Some other clues – I’m pretty sure it was a European language. It didn’t sound Slavic. The hotel catered to Scandanavians, but I don’t think it was a Scandanavian language either – to my ear those languages have a lilt that was missing. And I don’t recall their using the “ch” either.

Finnish maybe? Southern European – Hungarian or something? Yiddish maybe?

So to explicitly state my questions:

  1. What language was this family speaking?

  2. What other languages use the hard “ch”?

2

Dutch, maybe?

I think our g or ch is even harder than the German.:slight_smile:

3

Certainly Hebrew, Yiddish, and Arabic all have a hard “ch” (often rendered “kh” in transliteration.

4

Spanish J (“jota”) is pronounced like that also. Some common Spanish words with that sound are joder, joder y joder. _

5

Tigrinya, Amharic, Geez, Tigre, Arabic. They all are semtic languages and have the ch sound.

6

Some other possibilities…

It is a sound in Russian as well (lt’s based on the Greek Chi ). Some german or Slavic derivative is most likely.

-Redhawke

7

Gaelic?

8

Scotland has two languages with a hard “ch” sound: Scots* and Scots Gaelic. IAMNAGaelic speaker but I believe the “ch” sound is slightly softer in Gaelic. The word “loch” appears in both languages; if you want to really irritate Scottish people, pronounce Loch Lochy as “Lock Locky”.

*“Scots” means the Germanic dialect related to English. I know that it’s a moot point as to whether it’s a language or a set of dialects. I would imagine that Gaelic speakers also get irritated with the way Lowlanders pronounce some names.

9

Vlax Romani. That’s one Gypsy language that I know has it, there may be others. Europe is one place you’d expect to hear it.

-fh

10

Arabic, in fact, has two seperate “hard ch” sounds - one from the roof of the mouth, and one from the back of the throat.

11

First of all, the sound in question is the unvoiced velar fricative. The standard way to transcribe it phonetically is . The “ch” spelling can get confusing, since so many different languages use “c” and “ch” for a wide variety of other sounds.

Modern Greek has it, so do Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Ukrainian, Welsh, Breton, Azerbaijani, Persian.

Finnish has it not. Nor do Hungarian or Lithuanian, apart from loanwords from German or Slavic. Turkish used to have it, but in Istanbul pronunciation it has softened to [h], so that khan is now pronounced “han” in Turkey. But in Azerbaijan the sound has remained. Other languages of the Caucasus have it too: Georgian, Chechen, Armenian, etc.

Brazilian Portuguese pronounces r with the sound. So ‘good evening’, boa tarde, in Brazil is pronounced “boa takhji” [taxdZi]. Even in French, the uvular r can sound like when it becomes devoiced. The French word être sounds sort of like “etkh” [etx].

12

If we use the Symbol font, the Greek letter [symbol]c[/symbol] might be better to transcribe the sound in question, so it won’t be confused with the [ks] sound of “x” in English.

Thus: German ach du lieber — a[symbol]c[/symbol] du li:b@r
(@ =shwa)

Brazilian Portuguese boa tarde — boa ta[symbol]c[/symbol]dji

Hebrew phrase meaning ‘to life!’ — l@ [symbol]c[/symbol]ayim

French être — et[symbol]c[/symbol]

Alessan, I don’t think it would be very accurate to describe the Arabic letter Ha’ as a “ch” sound. It’s a pharyngal [H] from the middle of the throat. It has nothing of the scraping noise found in the velar [symbol]c[/symbol] sound from the soft palate. Ancient Hebrew is thought to have had this unvoiced pharyngal fricative as distinct from the velar fricative (even though the two sounds were written with the same letter). Thus aH ‘brother’ was pronounced a[symbol]c[/symbol], as it is in Modern Hebrew, but Hadash ‘new’ was pronounced Hadash (now pronounced [symbol]c[/symbol]adash). The Ashkenazic influence caused the loss of non-European sounds like this, but the Yemeni pronunciation of Hebrew still maintains the distinction.

I understand where you’re coming from, because when I first began to learn Arabic, with my background in Hebrew, I changed the [H] sound into [symbol]c[/symbol] and had to be corrected. I remember how embarrassed I was the first Arabic class I attended. The teacher gave the word Hisân ‘horse’ as an example of the letter H. I pronounced it [symbol]c[/symbol]isân, and the teacher informed me that I had just said the word for ‘testicles’!

13

Based on your input I’m guessing my little family was speaking Dutch. It wasn’t German but seemed Northern European. I had overlooked Dutch as a possibility but it makes sense when I think about it.

Thanks for all your help.

14

No, not really. Spanish does. So do some dialects of Portuguese. French, Italian, and Romanian do not.

The Scandinavians generally don’t have that sound. The Scandinavian languages (especially Swedish) have a certain “melody” you described as missing.

To be precise, Finnish and Hungarian are not Indo-European languages. They belong to a family called Finno-Ugric, which is unrelated to most other European languages. Neither contains the sound you describe.

Perhaps.

Well, I can’t determine what language they were speaking, if it’s a non-Slavic European language with the /x/ phoneme, it’s probably Dutch, Greek, maybe Yiddish or Gaelic or something. Maybe it really was Slavic. The different Slavic languages do sound quite distinct. For instance, Polish has a rather baroque vowel system, Serbo-Croatian is actually a tonal language, and Russian is full of palatalized consonants, which give each a distinct “flavor”. Then again, they could have been speaking something really obscure like Lojban or something. Hey, you never know.

Anyway, to answer your second question, many many languages do. Outside Europe, we have Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Hindi, Mandarin Chinese, Swahili (some dialects), and hundreds if not thousands more. Some languages have a voiced equivalent, which sounds kind of like you’re gargling. Arabic, French, Hindi and Greek are just some of the languages with that particular sound.

P.S. Can you tell I want to study linguistics when I get to college? :smiley:

15

What spoken Dutch sounded like to me the first time I heard it: like some obscure dialect from a very remote corner of England. It sounded familiar, yet seemed to hover just beyond the limit of intelligibility; I had the impression that if I just listened carefully enough, I could begin to understand it, as with most dialects of English. This was an illusion.

If you choose your words very carefully, you can make up sentences that are the same, or nearly the same, in both English and Frisian at once. I’ve heard that to ask the time in Frisian you can just say in English How late is it? and be understood.

The dominant dialect of Dutch pronounces the letter g as [symbol]c[/symbol]. That’s how the word gas was coined: the chemist Van Helmont simply took the Greek word [symbol]caoV[/symbol] and spelled the [symbol]c[/symbol] sound with g, Dutch style. In the film Manhattan Diane Keaton ostentatiously drops the name Van Gogh by pronouncing it “Van [symbol]c[/symbol]o[symbol]c[/symbol]” as though she were in the Netherlands. Woody Allen reacts with dismay at her pretentiousness. The ironic thing is that Van Gogh himself came from Brabant, a southern part of Holland where the dialect doesn’t use the [symbol]c[/symbol] sound for g.
“it is quite likely that most Dutchmen pronounce his name incorrectly if we take his own pronunciation as a benchmark.”
http://www.vangoghgallery.com/misc/pronunciation.htm