Re: Nisei Rangers?

"E.F.Schelby" <schelby@xxxxxxxx> ha scritto nel messaggio
news:rnrm74h6g2i5hcekuv7a5oegvb7v02gjjq@xxxxxxxxxx
Rich Rostrom <rrostrom.21stcentury@xxxxxxx> wrote:

"E.F.Schelby" <schelby@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rich Rostrom <rrostrom.21stcentury@xxxxxxx> wrote:

This man supposedly would infiltrate German positions at night
then bark out peremptory questions in his Prussian accent,

What please is a Prussian accent?

Not being a German-speaker, I couldn't say.

But I would be very surprised if the German
spoken in East Prussia was not distinctive
from the German spoken in Bavaria, Swabia,
Friesland, or Saxony.

First of all, there is no Prussian accent. There
are dialects, all varieties of Low German, which
are being spoken in the region that used to be Prussia.

Every European nation has regional accents,
as far as I know.

That's true, and Germany is especially rich in these
regional dialects. East-Prussian is earthy, funny,
and totally different from the language of Berlin,
which is witty, humorous, and good-maturely
sarcastic. These are only two examples, there a number
of others.


If those are examples, they are very unsuitable. An accent is a way of
pronouncing words and, in particular, of intoning sentences. So, a form of
pronunciation and intonation cannot be"witty, humorous and sarcastic". A way
of saying things can be that, not a way of pronouncing words.
An accent can _sound_ funny, to people who speak without it, and especially
to people that, not speaking with it, look down on those who do, either for
that very reason in itself or for other, social, reasons. For instance,
Bavarians sounded funny to people grown in Berlin. ISTR that Hitler worked
hard on pronunciation to get rid of his own accent, and largely succeeded.

That said, distance has an effect. To somebody grown in Berlin, the accent
of an Eastern Prussian would sound distinctive and different from his own.
To a man grown in Munich, it is possible that these same two men would seem
different, but that he wouldn't be able to define them as anything other
than "Prussian". To a man grown in Graz, they would sound not that
different. To a man grown in Debrecen or Brasov or Novi Sad, all of which
could very well end in a German unit if they were Volksdeutsche, they would
certainly sound the same. And to a man grown in Ostrov or Taganrog, serving
in an Ost Battalion, the two would both sound, well, German.

"The Prussian accent" is probably a figment of the
imagination, a caricature, both self-inflicted
to lampoon some Prussian military types or used by
Hollywood to nurture stereotypes.

Ah, now I see what the bone of contention is.

.

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