Everyone’s Bavarian at Oktoberfest!
To help get you in the mood for the festivities, Sixt has come up with this site. As I recall from some of our non-Bavarian WEBUM conversations, Bavarian is still a mystery in many an experienced expatriate mind.
Here are some rules, off the cuff, using the examples from that Sixt promo:
- Don’t use ü if you can help it. Sometimes you’ll see it converted to ia as in “Griaß eich” (stressed), sometimes it’s converted to a simple ‘u’ as in “zruck” (unstressed).
- “eu” generally becomes “ei.” Also as in “Griaß eich.” (Figured it out yet? It’s “Grüßt euch!“) And have you ever wondered what a Preis is?
- Forget everything you learned about voiced and unvoiced consonant pairs: g becomes interchangeable with c/k, t with d, and b with p.
- The letter ‘L’ following a stressed syllable is often (usually) converted to an ‘i’, and thus, “willst” becomes “wuisd” “holen” becomes “hoin”
- ‘ich’ and ‘mich’ and ‘dich’ are shortened respectively to ‘i’, ‘mi’ and ‘di.’
- The ‘ah’ sound of ‘mag’ drops down lower to ‘mog’, and that’s why you see those heart-shaped gingerbread cookies that say “i mog di.” This is also observable in words like “wagen” and “sagen” (“wong” and “song”). Note the consonants melting together there, too.
- Lots of trailing r’s become a’s – like as in “zua”
- “ö” is at least sometimes converted to “ee” &mash; as in “schee!” (“schön!“)
- “An” as separable prefix generally becomes “o” and the past participle prefix “ge-” is generally avoided — which is where Obatzda comes from (“Angebatzter“, presumably).
There you go. Prost!
As long as you can safely order beer without getting it diluted with Sprite, does it really matter? :)
No, of course it doesn’t really matter at all — beer or no beer. This post was just for those with an interest in (or who are/were bewildered by) the local langugage.
I think I’ve seen obatzda called ‘angemachter camembert’ in somewhere which wasn’t Munich. It left me wondering how one would go about hitting on cheese.
Guat g’macht. I’ dank’ di’. Griagst a bia vo’ mia dafee-a. Oder so ‘was ähnliches. :)
Thanks, you’ve explained why it’s so hard for me to write auf Hochdeitsch.
A Preiß is someone, anyone, born outside the Weißwurst belt. Sometimes and adjective beginning with ‘sch…” and rhyming with Preiß is added.
Jul: usually I find the cheese flirting with me, not the other way around.
Harvey: My pleasure — and thanks for the Bestätigung.
Hi, that was a cool idea of the marketing team i think. by the way your link to sixt is broken! Maybe you forogot the http prefix :)
Griaßdi Steffen, danke danke, den Fehla hob i behom. Sixt?
Pfiaddi!