Talk:'s-Hertogenbosch

How is the name of that city pronounced? David.Monniaux 16:03, 5 May 2005 (UTC)

My understanding is that it's pronounced /sɛrtoːɣənbɔs/, but I'm neither a Dutch speaker or a linguist, and you certainly shouldn't take my word for it. I think maybe I haven't got the vowels quite right. But roughly for English speakers it's close to "sair-toe-khen-BOSS", I've been told. Iceager 23:56, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

That's pretty close :o) — but be sure to make the "kh" a real fricative and a voiced one at that. So like the "ch" in Scottish "loch" but softer. And the "sair" is perhaps better rendered by "ser". The point is that the "H" at the beginning is assimilated by the "s" and the "sch" at the end is simply an imitation of High German Busch that was never functional, while the "'s" indicates the elision of "de" from "des" and the hyphen indicates that the whole should be pronounced as a single word. And that pronunciation has been constant over the eight centuries of existence of the city: Sertogenbos.--MWAK 07:10, 6 September 2005 (UTC)

Iceager is fully right questioning the accuracy. The s sound in Dutch used with words ending on -sch is different and is NOT 100% like the "s" used in English language. It is something in-between "s" and English "sh" as in "sugar". Check here also: Voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative -andy 80.129.116.55 00:35, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Well, the difference, if any, is minimal. The sound is alveolar, be it laminal. And what exactly do you mean with "Dutch words ending on -sch"? These are not pronounced differently from those ending on -s.--MWAK 12:57, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps interesting to note is that the well depicted in the picture of the marketplace has been removed. --81.206.214.43 (talk) 20:36, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Could someone with knowledge of Dutch possibly explain how the word(s?) 's-Herogenbosch works in Dutch? I assume that's a genitive 's', but what's it doing on the front? Ilovechocolatechip (talk) 17:39, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

The entire name is, as stated in the article, a contraction of des Hertogen bosch. So the place is a bos (in modern spelling, cf. "bush" in English) or "wood" that is des Hertogen, "of the Duke". So, yes, it is a genitive and des is the genitive declension of the article de (and articles are in front of nouns in Dutch, as in English, and that's why it's in front). But you should not be fooled by the apostrophe; this doesn't as such indicate a genitive in Dutch but is a general sign indicating elision, or the disappearance of parts of a word. Whenever it could be comfortably combined with the subsequent noun, our lazy mumbling Dutch ancestors simply reduced the des to a single "s" and the later scholars in the 17th century reinventing the spelling of the written language didn't quite approve of this and thought it best to point out the ommission by a ', lest future generations (deemed if possible even more stupid than the present one) should forget the provenance. Also, not to spoil the word image, the "s" was kept apart from the noun, but, to indicate it should be pronounced as a single word, connected to it by a hyphen. In the Middle Ages they weren't yet so subtle and simply wrote it all as one word.--MWAK (talk) 08:38, 9 February 2009 (UTC)