Denmark   It was good to be on my own again, not having to see and do what the tour guide wanted you to see and do, but making one’s own decisions based on one’s guide book or on earlier research.

In the past we had taken the angular route from Germany across the Femer Bælt by train-and-car ferry to Sjælland and Copenhagen. This time I wanted to take the all-land route instead, going up the Jutland peninsula, turning right and crossing Fyn and Sjælland to Copenhagen (and eventually all the way to Sweden), via the bridge-and-tunnel route.

In Kiel I took the very same train as a couple of weeks ago to Rendsburg to make my connection, so I watched us once again go over the Hochbrücke and around the big curve. In Rendsburg I caught the EuroCity train coming north up from Hamburg and going to northern Jutland, to Denmark’s second city of Århus. I however, made a change in Fredericia for the west-east line headed in the direction of Copenhagen.

Odense & HC Andersen   Fredericia is located on the Lille Bælt, the narrowest of the three north-south waterways through the Danish islands, which has had bridge crossings over it for quite a while. The train crossed over from Jutland to Fyn, where my destination was Odense, Denmark’s third city, and the home of Hans Christian Andersen. I took a pleasant walk in the historic district surrounding the house where he was born, in 1805. All the houses are from the late 1700’s to early 1800’s and are of the petite Danish style that makes them look like slightly overgrown dollhouses. All were restored, on cobblestone streets, and in bright colors. Beyond this district, churches and the City Hall were all in the typical traditional brick gothic style you see all around the Baltic area. Down near the river was a pleasant park with a rose garden, and a statue to Andersen. Just in case anyone didn’t know, there was a banner across a main street that said: “Odense—HC Andersens stad [City]”, which brings up an opportunity to talk about his name.

English has women’s names that are formed from two names, such as Maryann or Rosemary. It’s hard to think of any common men’s names in English that are doubled in the same way. On the other hand, it is very common in other languages to have doubled men’s names. They are rarely written as one word, and are sometimes hyphenated, but what appears as two names is one. An example is the French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, or the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini. The single name John Paul has also been used as a Pope’s name. Therefore, as it turns out, Hans Christian is a common Scandinavian name, which is also a single name, so an element should not be left out. However, it is long, so Scandinavians almost always reduce it to initials, as in the sign above. The letters HC are read as HO SE (E as in cafE). Also, remember that Danish is tricky with the ND combination, the D disappearing more than one might expect, so HC Andersen is pronounced Ho Se Annersen. [Please do not make any “José” jokes.]

Do not trivialize in your mind the importance of HC Andersen, and certainly not in Denmark. His name is on streets everywhere, and his statue is always prominent. Before leaving home, I checked some websites, and got the names in Danish of his works. I’ve chosen four. Three will be obvious, and we’ll have a little fun with the fourth. Try to figure it out, before you see the answer (maybe) in the following paragraph.

A Scandinavian icon, maybe second only to “Skrik” is: Den lille havfrue.

As we’ve seen, “hav” is “sea”; frue looks like German Frau, so we have “The Little Sea-Woman”, which is, of course, “The Little Mermaid”. There will be a temptation to laugh at the phraseology “Sea-Woman”, when English so readily has a set word, mermaid. Then you start thinking how “mar”, and “mer” in different languages do mean “sea”, such as in mar(ine), and you’ll see that “mermaid” is “sea-girl”, not so far from “sea-woman”.

Now try this: Keiserens nye klæder.

“Keiserens” comes apart into three pieces, and you see the relationship to the German word “Kaiser”. It’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes”.

And now: Prinsessen på ærten.

The last word is impossible, until you get the first word, and the whole thing falls into place. However, note that Andersen named it “The Princess on the Pea”, while we know it as “The Princess and the Pea”. Also note that when he wrote it, he spelled it “Prinsessen paa Ærten”, although it was pronounced as it is today. The Danish spelling reform after WW2 changed “aa” to “å”, and dropped the capitalization of nouns. German is the only language left that still capitalizes all nouns, at all times. English used to, which you’ll note if you look at older documents, where you’ll see things like “We, the People...”. There is still a maddening tendency in English to do this, such as when writing letters to “the Members of this worthy Organizaton”. Also, English is the ONLY language that standardly capitalizes in titles, not only nouns, as in “The Princess and the Pea”, but also other “important” words, such as in “The Little Mermaid”. Note the non-capitalization above of Danish within titles, which is standard for other languages.

The fourth Andersen title I’ll mention, “Den grimme ælling”, is not guessable, which is why we’re going to have a little fun with it. I will not translate it, but instead have you read the following. I found the Danish text of the end of the story, picked out some recognizable Danish words, which I’ve blended into some English text of my own. If you can’t figure out this Andersen fairy tale, you must have slept through your childhood.

He then realized that he had come from a svaneæg, and den grimme ælling had turned out to be a svane himself, and so he svømmede away to join the other majestic svaner.

Store Bælt   Moving ahead now a century and a half, leaving Odense by train, I was about to cross between Denmark’s major islands for the first time not using a ferry. It is surprising how matter-of-fact the connection now seems. Of course you go from Odense to Copenhagen by train (or car). How else?

The two connections built recently, between the Danish islands of Fyn and Sjælland (rail 1997, road 1998), and then between Sjælland and Sweden (1999), are not exactly bridges; they are bridge-tunnels. The only parallel I know of is the Chesapeake Bridge-Tunnel connecting the Virginia part of the Delmarva peninsula over Chesapeake Bay to the rest of Virginia, where the road alternates between going over a bridge, then, via a (probably artificial) island, going through a tunnel.

To cross the Store Bælt, a distance of 18 kilometers, a natural island called Sprogø about halfway across was utilized. Both the four-lane highway and two-track rail right-of-way cross on a causeway as far as Sprogø. Looking out of the left window I was on a train gone to sea; looking out of the right window was the highway, then the water. At Sprogø, there was a not totally unexpected surprise. Only the highway goes over Storebæltsbroen (bro=bridge). I could see the road traffic ascending towards the two bridge towers I had watched the Deutschland sail under the night before (actually it was technically the same day, it having been at 1 AM). Meanwhile, at Sprogø the rail line descended into Storebæltstunnelen, 8 kilometers long, and taking just four minutes to pass through. Even though the Eurostar going under the English Channel is profoundly impressive and takes more than four times as long, this crossing impresses in its own way.

København   My first full day in Copenhagen I did what Beverly and I have done for years. Michelin in hand, including its excellent maps, I did my urban walk—some would call it an urban marathon—and walked to every point I wanted to see over a period of seven hours, 11:30 to 6:30. There were numerous rest periods on park benches and rims of fountains, no museums were involved, and of course I had been here before, although many years ago.

I had chosen the Sofitel Plaza across from the main station. I have a membership in the Accor Hotels network, which includes Sofitel, and I got an automatic upgrade to a room with two balconies, with a view to the left of Tivoli. Tivoli is the amusement park, one of the most famous in the world, dating from 1843, with restaurants, rides, and park areas. We were there years ago, and I didn’t want to do it again. It is a more traditional-style Disney World, and its prices are not low, but that didn’t stop people from forming long lines at the entrance. It’s interesting that the price was quoted, not only in Danish crowns as DKK 75, but also as €10.50, since they want to attract euro business, too. It’s still hard for me to figure in crowns, but adding 25% to the euro figure [see below] brings it over $13 for an adult just to walk through the gate.

Beyond Tivoli is Rådhuspladsen, City Hall Square (remember plads is pronounced like Norwegian plass, only Norwegian spells it sensibly), on one side of which is the statue of HC Andersen, to be sure, on the HC Andersens Boulevard side. A sign inside the building said “Københavns Rådhus 100 År”, which would make this newer building the same age as Longyearbyen in Spitsbergen. From there, there is a famous string of streets referred to by the name Strøget leading through the old town. (Keep in mind that European streets often keep changing their names after a few blocks.) Strøget is a gågade, as are many streets in the old town. Strøget is not the name of a specific street, but corresponds to something like “The Stroll”. It ends where the newer town (1700’s) starts, at Kongens Nytorv, which I mentioned earlier, “The King’s New Square”. Leading off that is Nyhavn, a canal that now has cafés all along it. None other than HC Andersen lived at three different addresses along Nyhavn.

I walked way north to see the famous statue of Den lille havfrue, sitting on a boulder at water’s edge, wistfully looking north up the Øresund. I remember her not being full-size, but my mind’s eye (that liar) had reduced her to doll-size. In reality, she was “lille”, maybe 85% of life-size. But for the first time I realized why she looked as real as she did, and not too “fishy”. Most mermaids are depicted as fish from the waist down, but Den lille havfrue in Copenhagen most definitely has legs, which she sits on, ankles crossed. However, each leg seems to have fins on it, and her feet do turn into two fish-tails. This gives her just that much more of a human look. I had never really noticed it before.

In the area was Churchillparken, and nearby, a bust of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, labeled as De Forenede Staters Præsident. (You should be able to pick out “stat”, and guess at “forenede”.) You may also remember that, I some time ago pointed out that blå sounded like “blow”, but meant “blue”, and grå sounded like “grow”, but meant “gray”. I saw something labeled Gråhundbus zip past, but I would doubt it’s the same company.

To end the day I had dinner outdoors at the Restaurant Nytorv on Nytorv (New Market [Square]), which lists itself as a “Dansk restaurant midt i byen”. [Remember the “midtfjords” ferry change and of Longyearbyen.] Being Scandinavia, each table had a lap blanket hanging over one chair, which I ended up using as time went by. (This day had been partly sunny but mostly overcast; the next day was bright sun.) With dinner I had a Carlsberg—in Copenhagen the beer choice is pretty much Carlsberg or Tuborg. I was considering skipping dessert, until I saw they offered Pære Belle Helene, which, considering everything, was a must-do. In Oslo years ago the name had been all-French: Poire Glacée Belle Hélène, but having half the name in Danish was just fine. I also ordered a Linie Akvavit which that man in Oslo introduced me to this trip, so I ended up completing dinner with Pære Belle Helene to represent Oslo in 1961 and the Linie Akvavit to represent Oslo in 2006.

Currency   It’s easy to get used to the ease of dealing in euros, since so many countries use them now. At first it was nice that the euro was on a par with the dollar, so that all prices looked like dollar prices. For some time, now, the dollar has been below the euro, so you have to add about 25% to euro prices: €40 = $50 roughly. However, on this trip, only two countries use the euro, Finland and Germany. The three Scandinavian countries remain on crowns, each one different. 100 Norwegian crowns are about $16, 100 Danish crowns are about $17, 100 Swedish crowns about $13.50. Having gotten used to using the euro spoils one, but before the euro there used to be confusion like this going between all countries.

Danish   Danish pronunciation is rather unique, making it more difficult to learn than Norwegian and Swedish, in my opinion. I don’t claim to know all that much about it, but aside from the ND situation, where the word for “man” is pronounced pretty close to the English, yet nevertheless spelled “mand”, three common sounds appear in their voiced counterparts. Not worring about the terminology “voiced”, this is what appears:

T to D: Swedish gata; Norwegian gata or gate; Danish gade (street).

K to G: Swedish kaka; Norwegian kake; Danish kage (cake).

P to B: Swedish öppen; Norwegian åpen; Danish åben (open).

So be careful—a fruit stand was selling blommer, and you have to think twice about what that B corresponds to. (It also was selling “store bananer”, so the bananer story now makes full circuit Copenhagen to Copenhagen.) And the city’s name—every language I know of uses a P in the name Copenhagen, including Swedish, which is Köpenhamn, yet in Danish the city is København.

[Mentioning “cake” above reminds me to restate the fact I mentioned when we were in Vienna two years ago, so famous for its pastries: what Americans call “Danish” or “Danish pastry”, the Danes themselves call vinerbrød, literally “Viennese bread”, which indicates where they feel it originally came from.]

Still, Danish words and phrases are still very recognizable. I saw a sign that said “Caféen er åben”; a pastry shop was having a sale and was selling items at “halv pris”. A pedestrian street was labeled as being a “Gågade”. (In many languages, the idea of “going” always implies on foot.) If you were interested in buying a good “bog [change that G]” a shop had a display labeled “Månadens bog”. Take that apart into four pieces; the first piece is difficult to guess, but there, logic will help you.

It comes apart this way: månad+en+s+bog; month+the+’s+book; the month’s book, flipped around in English, which so frequently prefers the Italic “of” construction to the Germanic “’s”, yields the Book of the Month.

When we started studying Swedish in the 1970’s, something in particular struck me. Consider the expression “Time and tide wait for no man”. Consider the concept of “tide”; consider the concept of “time”.

The Swedish (and Danish) word for “time” is “tid” (I as in skI). There is a Swedish word “timme”, (Danish “time”), but it means “hour”. So if you keep me waiting for a “halv time” you are wasting 30 minutes of my “tid”. Beyond that, “tid” is also related to the German word for “time”, Zeit (TSEIT), and “the tides” are in German “die Gezeiten”. So, clearly in the Germanic languages, the very concepts of time and tide are related.

If you want to see when you can visit a shop in København, you look for its Åbningstider. There are Seven Elevens here, too, which get their name from being open from 7 AM to 11 PM. The one here varied from that, since it said it was “Åben 24 timer”.

Øresund Circuit   København is unique from Oslo and Stockholm in that it is a capital that abuts another country, albeit a Scandinavian country. Just as New Jersey is across the Hudson from New York, Sweden is across the Øresund from København. Malmö has always been taunted as being just a suburb of København, and with the new bridge-tunnel connecting the two cities, that goes double. I understate real estate is cheaper in Southern Sweden, and many Danes are choosing to live in Sweden and to commute to work in København by train. It’s similar to what happens between New Jersey and New York, except that here it’s a matter of two different countries, and—two different currencies, unless that’s ever straighted out via the euro.

The rail service has been improved with regular Øresund trains taking a U-route, along both the Danish and Swedish side, connected at the bottom by the bridge-tunnel. The space at the top of the U is connected by ferry. I decided to do an Øresund rail circuit my second day in København, starting by going up to the top of the Danish U to Helsingør. But from there I first took a side trip, further into Sjælland to Hillerød and its Frederiksborg Slot. The castle is a beauty of Dutch Renaissance style (all those pointed gables), and in red brick. It’s located on the far side of, and physically on three islands in, the Slotssø, the Castle Lake (slot+s+sø). I walked around the lake to enter its courtyards.

Back in Helsingør, which has a charming old town, the main attraction is Kronborg Slot, which sticks out on a peninsula, and is very visible from town and from the ferry to Sweden. It was built to protect the entrance to the Øresund, here at its narrowest point. I also hiked out to see its courtyards.

Kronborg Slot is not as attractive as Frederiksborg Slot, but is laden with meaning. Don’t forget the Prins af Danmark. If you haven’t caught on yet, take the name of the town, Helsingør, and drop the H. Does it now look more like Elsinore? Shakespeare apparently never actually visited Denmark, or Helsingør, but set Hamlet here nevertheless. It was advertised locally that in August, a group called Hamlet Sommer had scheduled performances: “Hamlet Sommer præsenterer Shakespeare på Kronborg”.

The ferry across the Øresund was included in my railpass, and took only about 20 minutes. Even though I’d still be spending two nights in København, this was my first time back in Sweden since 1973, and had a certain coming-home quality. Don’t be confused by these two similar names—from Helsingør in Denmark you arrive in Helsingborg in Sweden. Helsingborg is double the size of Helsingør, pleasant enough, but with little to see, so I took the train down the coast to Lund.

Lund has the second oldest university in Sweden, after Uppsala, which is the oldest in all Scandinavia. It has a college town atmosphere, but the Domkyrkan/Cathedral is the thing to see. It’s grey-sandstone, and the finest example of Romanesque architecture in Sweden.

My last stop was Malmö. The huge Stortorget/Great Market [Square] dates from the 1530’s and has some very fine buildings around it. From there it was over the bridge.

The Swedish name is Öresundsbron. In Danish it’s Øresundsbroen. Note the spelling difference at the beginning and the grammatical difference at the end. To make sure friends remain friends, the official name of the bridge is a hybrid: Øresundsbron.

You only get a fleeting glance at the bridge as the train approachs it. The highway crosses the bridge on the upper level, and the trains below. There are eight kilometers of bridge, four of island, and four of tunnel, before reaching the Copenhagen airport first, then Copenhagen.

The island in this case is not natural, but man-made, and I’ve come across two points about it. First, my inclination about having to build a man-made island is one of it being contrary to nature, and, grudgingly, a necessary evil. The actuality turns out to be quite the reverse. Soil from the sea, presumably the Öresund, had to be dredged up to form it, and, as it turns out, this soil brought with it a lot of old seeds, some from rare plants, and some from—quite incredibly—otherwise extinct plants. For that reason, this artifical island, which is also a favored stopping place for birds, is a nature preserve, even with the car and train traffic speeding by. Only scientists are allowed to visit the island, and then, only on two days a year. What an interesting side result of tinkering with nature, one which turns out to be a win-win situation.

The other point about this artificial island is its name. Sprawling to the north of it is the natural Danish island known as Saltholm, which translates as Salt Islet. One possibility would have been to name the artificial island something like South Saltholm, but the engineers decided to have their little joke instead. The name of the artificial island is Peberholm. If you don’t get their little joke, then you have to review what a B in Danish corresponds to.

Wordplay 8   We haven’t had a wordplay for a while, and it’s appropriate that we try some now in each of the five Germanic languages other than English that we’ve been discussing. I’ll see how I can tie them in to this trip.

Dutch   On one of the ferries on the Sognefjord in Norway I said I met several Dutch people, we got talking about language, and I got up the nerve to read to them from the laptop a wordplay in Dutch I was holding on to for future use. It was, I’m sure, the first time I’ve ever said anything in Dutch to real Netherlanders. It’s good I was just reading some text, because otherwise I’d have been lost. The Dutch wordplay in question is not a tonguetwister. It takes advantage of a quirk in Dutch, which means that it doesn’t work in other languages.

The name Frank is the same in Dutch and German, except that in Dutch it’s spelled Frans, and in German it’s spelled Franz. (This is typical; the Germans spell Spitsbergen Spitzbergen.)

The French language in Dutch is also Frans. You also need to keep in mind the use of “the” with names of languages. English does so only rarely, as in a phrase like “...translated from the French by ...”. Other languages do so more frequently, and you’ll notice that French is referred to here as “het Frans”. Also let me remind that the Dutch neuter word for “the” is often written ’et, since it is almost always pronounced that way.

I first saw this wordplay without any quotes, which made it unnecessarily difficult. I’ve added quotes for simplification. Note the following: “is” is pronounced ISS. “Nee” rhymes with cafE and means “no” (related to “nay”). “zei” means “said”, with vowels as in cafE and skI. “tegen” here means “to” and is pronounced TE.khuh (E as in cafE). I’m not going to translate this. I think you can figure out what it means, once you realize that both guys have the same name.

German   This very contrived German wordplay fits here because of its last word. Pronounce it all as well as you can, keeping in mind that the whole point is using a long string of rhyming words ending in –agen, that A being very much a yawn vowel: -AH.gen. Don’t worry too much about the rest.

Danish   Speaking of Copenhagen, here’s one in Danish.

Note that “altid” means “always” because it’s constructed as “all (the) time”. This is a tonguetwister because of the variation with L and R combinations: PL- varying with FR- and BR-.

Norwegian   We’ll use this Norwegian one because of the first word, and the man’s name. Remember again that the A’s are very much yawn vowels: AH. Berliner buns would be jelly doughnuts. Every word starts with B.

The pattern of difficulty in the following one is to reverse between T-K-P in the first two words, P-P-T in the next, and P-P-K in the last.

Swedish   Similarly, this next one very symmetrically mirrors P-P-K and K-P-P in the two long words, repeatedly, as we count peppercorns in a copper pan.

[Note that Norwegian above has åtte, but Swedish has åtta. This is just like gate (Danish gade) and gata. Expect to see a lot more A-endings in Swedish. Compare Lille Bælt and Store Bælt with Lilla Nygatan and Stora Nygatan, two streets in Gamla Stan in Stockholm.

This tonguetwister works almost as well in English, except the plural of the Swedish word doesn’t change, making it a smooth transition after the first line, while English would have to start adding –s. However, it would not work at all as well in German, or at least in the same way, and the reason why is worth discussing, when talking about Germanic languages. You will discover here that fossils exist in language as well as in rocks, and you will be able to recognize a lot more German words.

Sound Shifts   Before we talk about sounds shifting, let’s first clarify just where the three large sub-families of Indo-European languages that we usually discuss first developed. It will be no surprise that Proto-Italic started in central Italy. Of the ancient Italic languages, only Latin survived, in ancient Rome, and spread beyond to the current languages in this group. It will be a bit of a surprise where Proto-Russic (Proto-Slavic) languages started, because it isn’t in Russia. They originated in the western two-thirds of Ukraine, later spreading out from there, including north into Russia.

The Germanic languages have always been coastal. Proto-Germanic originated in the Netherlands, Northern Germany, Denmark, Southern Sweden, and the Norwegian coast. Germanic speakers hugged the North Sea and the Baltic, just the area I’ve been traveling in and discussing on this trip.

The movement south toward the Alps came later, with dialects developing into High (Mountain) German. Westward expansion came in the late 4th Century with the invasion of previously Celtic Britain. The invaders are usually referred to as Anglo-Saxons, but that is only part of the story. They were Angles from Angeln, Saxons from Saxony, Jutes from Jutland, Frisians from the Frisian Islands. Angeln is the peninsula just north of Kiel and Rendsburg, the eastern section of Germany’s part of the Jutland peninsula.

Actually, the Angles seem to get full credit for the invasion, at least by the fact that “England” is based on “Angle-land”. “Angeln” apparently meant “hook”, and the ancient Angles that lived in Angeln were presumably fisherman. One of the suggested origins of their name has a connection with fishing. Today, in addition to saying “to fish”, you can say “to go angling” (similarly in German). When you talk of an Englishman going angling, you’re using two variations of the same root.

Of all the sub-groups of Indo-European, a certain change affected ONLY the Germanic languages, all of them, where gradually, certain consonants changed to others. I’ll only mention one single example: P changed to F. You can find words in all other Indo-European groups that have P where the Germanic counterparts have F. In other words, the other languages serve as a control group so you can observe the change in Germanic.

As an example, let’s use words for “father”. Ancient Sanskrit uses pitár, Latin pater, Spanish padre, French père. As soon as you move to the Germanic languages, you see the results of the First Germanic Sound Shift: English father, Swedish fader (shortens to far), German Vater (pronounced FA.ter). In other words, F in Germanic, P elsewhere.

Then look at a word in English borrowed from Latin like “paternal”, and compare it to “father”: “pater-“ stands opposite “father”. The only way English can re-gain a P in this concept is to borrow from a language that has a P here. (It can also be noted that you can often use Germanic “fatherly” in place of Italic “paternal”.)

Another example: Latin pēs; Sanskrit pāda; Lithuanian peda; French pied; Spanish pie, as opposed to English foot; Dutch voet; German Fuss; Norwegian/Swedish fot; Danish fod.

This sort of thing doesn’t happen overnight, but in stages. Presumably Germanic words in P gradually became pronounced with a combined PF, eventually losing the first element to become F.

Proto-Indo-European had existed in about 4000 BCE (Before the Common Era). This First Shift occurred later in Proto-Germanic between 500 and 50 BCE. It obviously eventually stopped, otherwise we wouldn’t have any words at all with a P in them. However, just like with a wildfire that affects a large area and then dies out and seems to be over with, a later flareup of the exact same thing happened in only one Germanic area. This later flareup was called the Second Germanic Sound Shift, did pretty much the same thing, and affected only High (Mountain) German. It started between 200 and 500 CE (Common Era), and again died out in the 800s CE. Again, we’ll just look at the change from P to F as it affected German ONLY, before dying out again. We will again realize that P gradually became PF, which gradually became F.

The words that started changing early on in this period had time to convert completely. For instance: English sleep and Dutch slapen can serve as our unchanged control group, to compare with German schlafen. German went through from P to PF to F completely here.

But words that started to change later on during this period never had time to complete their transition before this second “wildfire” died out. Use English apple and Dutch appel as a control group this time, and compare them to German Apfel. The final stage of changing PF to F never had sufficient time to be completed.

Whenever you see a German word with PF in it, you are looking at what I would call a linguistic fossil. Just as you can look at rocks and see fossils in them of creatures that were captured in mid-development, so you see a fossil in a German word with a PF in it that was frozen in time and never achieved maturity.

You can understand numerous German words by “undoing” the Second Shift. For instance if you see “Harfe”, you might revert the F back to a P and assume it’s a harp. Try reverting these words with F, and you’ll see you can figure out more than you perhaps thought: offen, hoffe, reif.

Also try reverting words with PF to see what they are in English: you might cook something in a Pfanne, have a Pfennig made out of Kupfer, eat a Pflaume, or buy a Pfund of Pflaumen.

The greatest curiosity are those words affected by both phases, having both PF and F. Someone might smoke a Pfeife (or it could be a musical instrument), or you could put Pfeffer on your food. The middle of these words was affected first, and the change had time to complete, the beginning started later and did not complete.

Do realize that the P in the PF combination is always clearly pronounced in German, although in English, since that combination is not native, the first element is usually disregarded. Consider how you pronounce the name of the actress Michelle Pfeiffer. Also consider what sort of musician her last name implies. It’s an academic curiosity that if you don’t pronounce the P in the PF, you are affectively completing the incompleted Second Shift! If you know the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, he has essentially the same name as Michelle Pfeiffer, but has Anglicized the name.

So, back to the wordplay. Compare these:

You might now understand why the German here is all Fs and fossilized PFs, but no Ps like the others. You are looking at the results of the Second Germanic Sound Shift.

Here at the end, I might add just one more piece of the Second Shift, where T changed to TS then to S. Where other Germanic languages retain the T, German will have an S where the change was completed, but TS where it was incomplete.

Examples of this type of completed change to S: what? and was?; nut and Nuss; it and es; greet! and Grüss!; great and gross; water and Wasser.

Examples of this type of incomplete change, showing a fossilized TS (do realize that this TS is spelled TZ or Z, but is in reality TS): net and Netz; heart and Herz; two and zwei; ten and zehn; twelve and zwölf; twenty and zwanzig. Compare the following, which shows repeated examples of the T to S change in German only: