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Comment by vaskebjorn | Hacker News Reader

Everything he says here also applies to german. For example, to actually say "ich" properly you need to have a wide kind of smile that feels incredibly strange to an english native speaker.

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Why? The "ch" in "inc" is exactly the same sound as that represented by "h" in words like "human" and "huge" in English. It's a voiceless palatal fricative. It doesn't require a "wide kind of smile" unless you somehow need to also do that when saying the vowel in "team" too.

The "ich-laut" does not exist in english. It's not like just saying "ish."

Example: https://youtu.be/oSIPAMoCzhA?t=195

The parent comment is correct—the ich-laut isn't its own phoneme in English, but (at least in many dialects) it does exist as an allophone of /h/.

It very much does exist, and I chose those words on purpose as they're places where the realisation of /h/ is a voiceless palatal fricative (i.e., the German ich-laut) and not a voiceless glottal fricative. "ish" would be a voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative.

I recommend you read up on English phonology, as a video for German learners really isn't a good source.

My point was that what Nabokov said about Russian "When you speak Russian your mouth ought to distend laterally at the corners" also applied to German, and that saying "ich" properly in German was an example of this.

Yes, one does not NEED to have the mouth open wide to express the "voiceless palatal fricative" but if you do not do it with a "slight smile" as described in that video it will not sound right.

I truly hope you know something about German pronunciation, otherwise I don't know what would compel you to even comment on the thread.

[ç] is an allophone of [h], and it's very hard for English speakers to notice that they're not just saying [h]. I've had the same problem with [e] versus [ɛ].

Not an expert, but some "to IPA" websites I checked transcribes "the huge human" as "ðə hjuːʤ ˈhjuːmən", but "ich" (voiceless palatal fricative) as "iç" (and "ach" (voiceless velar fricative) as "ax")).

ç != hj

ETA: Wikipedia notes:

> The sound at the beginning of huge in most British accents is a voiceless palatal fricative [ç], but this is analysed phonemically as the consonant cluster /hj/ so that huge is transcribed /hjuːdʒ/. As with /hw/, this does not mean that speakers pronounce [h] followed by [j]; the phonemic transcription /hj/ is simply a convenient way of representing the single sound [ç].

So maybe ç == hj.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology#cite_note-18

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