Re: [Cz-L] Re: czernowitz-l digest: January 13, 2014

The Viennese have their own dialect and pronunciation,
which is different from the way we spoke in Czernowitz.
But Czernowitzer Deutsch is very similar to Austrian German,
both in pronunciation and the use of words.

Mimi

On Jan 14, 2014, at 9:05 AM, andy halmay wrote:

> Benjamin - re High German, etc. In her autobiography, Lucca
> Ginsburg told a story of a German engineering consultant who had
> come to work in a company in Israel where Lucca worked. The man
> prided himself for being able to pinpoint exactly where Germans had
> grown up by their dialect. He spoke no Hebrew, of course, and
> hardly anyone in the company spoke German so he ate his lunches
> alone. One time, one of the people in the company sat down next to
> him and addressed him in Yiddish which the German could make out.
> He had never before heard Yiddish and puzzled over it. He told
> Lucca that he was mystified for the first time in his life - he
> simply couldn't peg that man's background as to where he had come
> from because he had never heard this dialect before. We emigrated
> from Cz in the spring of 1939, mother insisted we speak English in
> the home, so I picked up un-accented Canadian English pretty
> quickly. I started acting in my late teens, attended
> Lorne Greene's Academy of Radio Arts and by 1949 was working in
> radio with no one aware that we were immigrants. When TV arrived in
> 1952 I met an Austrian actor, Joseph Furst, who asked me if I could
> do a Viennese dialect. Of course, by then I had lost half my
> Czernowitzer German but actors are always hungry and never turn
> down any roles so I said, "Naturlich!" The government's radio
> network overseas department was doing some broadcasts to Austria
> and needed actors with a Viennese dialect. Fortunately, three of
> the four-man cast, were older Austrians who had just arrived from
> Vienna so I listened to them and simply imitated them but to me
> they sounded pretty much like Czernowitzers. Now there is a German
> woman in my apartment building today who comes from Berlin and I
> can hardly understand her. Her German to me sounds like cockney
> must sound to an Oxford grad. I get the sense that most German
> speaking Czernowitzers spoke Hochdeutsch.
> Andy
>

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Received on 2014-01-14 08:14:49