Nazzie Germany

I was watching Patterns of Force the other day and smiled when I caught William Shatner's slip in using the old (inaccurate) pronunciation of Nazi. I don't know how true this is, but appearantly quite a few soldiers during WWII said "Nazzie" while others correctly used "Notsy". The only other time I've seen television acknowledge this was in an episode of King of the Hill when Cotton Hill (Hank's WWII veteran father) used this pronunciation.

 

Remember....

1) Both Shatner and Nimoy are Jews born in 1931. So their reaction would be different from most people.

2) Shatner is famous for deliberately mispronouncing words in an attempt to poke fun. I don't blame him one bit.

 

Actually, both would technically be correct, since it's a less than polite phonomic nickname from an acronym for 'National Socialist Party'.

 

In terms of "authenticity", the Germans themselves would have used "notsy" - and many actually did, despite the abbreviation sometimes being considered a less than polite way of saying NSDAP.

Since the Ekosians weren't really Germans, John Gill would have had an easier time selling the concept by using the catchy nickname than by trying to first explain that the Ekosians would have to think of themselves as "Deutsch", or worse still, as "Socialists" or "Arbeiters".

Perhaps Gill told these folks that they were to call themselves Noble Aryan Zeonist Exterminators?

Timo Saloniemi

 

That's what I thought of immediately I saw the thread title.

Doesn't Shatner pronounce Enterprise as "ennerprize" sometimes though?

 

It might be an Anglophone Canadian accent. I also think of how Winston Churchill pronounced it nazzies, which always brings to mind Kenneth Mars' bit in The Producers...

 

Notsy? Is this another American thing, because the German pronunciation would have been "Natzi". After all, it was National Socialism, not Notional Socialism.

 

Well, yeah, but if you give an English speaker "Natzi", he pronounces the "a" like in "hat", and it comes off sounding like "Nätzi"...

...Whereas the "o" in "not" sounds pretty much like the German "a".

But try and describe to an English speaker what an "ü" or a "y" should sound like, let alone "ch"! And German is one of the simplest languages to pronounce... The English discrepancy between spelling and pronunciation seems to hobble people in that respect.

(Then again, the speakers of simply pronounced languages are sometimes at a disadvantage, too. I'm constantly surprised by how for example Arabs never need to struggle with the weirdest European names, having such a broad selection of native sounds to choose from that they can effortlessly pronounce Finnish or Gaelic names alike, then write them down so that a fellow Arab can repeat the flawless pronunciation without ever having heard it.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

Uh, no it doesn't. Not to me at least (these things are probably heavily dependant on one's own language). The sound, to me, seems pretty much the one in the English word "one", which is very distinct from both "not" and "hat".

Ah, but isn't Finnish spelt almost completely phonetically?

 

Which is actually an extension of Mel's 2,000 Year Old Man routine, about how Churchill said it that way and everybody stopped fighting the Nazis and went off looking for those "Narzies" he kept talking about

 

Depends on one's accent, I guess. I have a hard time seeing how the German "a" could sound like the vowel in "one," which in my accent rhymes with "fun." I guess there are some accents in which "one" could sound like the word "wan" (or the name "Juan" as often mispronounced by Americans -- indeed puns based on "Juan/one" are fairly common).

In a typical American English accent, the short O sound in "not" is a lot like the default A sound in a lot of Indo-European languages, or like the sound that British people tend to render as "ar." Americans would tend to write it as "ah." There is a distinction between the short O and the "ah," but it's a subtle one to American listeners.

 

This thread needs sound clips.

 

Agreed...

OTOH, if you equate "Nazi" with "nutsy", you can't go far wrong. Which is sort of self-evident in afterthought.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Simple fix.

I just call them "fuckin' kraut cocksuckers."

Joe, old school

 

Hey, that's an insult to the kraut cocksucker community! Apologize.

Ben, kraut cocksucker

 

Being an English teacher, I'm concerned about grammar. Because it is important to understanding proper communication. So....

Is "kraut" explaining whose "cock" is being "sucked"?
OR
Is "kraut" describing the "sucker" doing the "cock"?


EDITED: By hint from Therin.

 

The second one.

 

As I tell my students, "I was just testing you."

 

I'm with George Carlin on this - it's time for "cocksucker" to stop being a dirty word. He says, "All women do it, some men do it, how can it be bad if everyone's doin' it?"

(I disagree with him, some women don't.)