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Diederich
My professor said this name in class and I fell in love with it. WDYT? He said it something like:Deedeh-leashBut I am totally comfortable Americanizing it as Deedrick.

This message was edited 9/2/2008, 5:56 PM

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I think it's a nice name. It reminds me of Dieter, which I like. I don't know anything about old German, but I would have never guessed it would be pronounced like that. Very interesting. I pronounce it the Americanized way that you mentioned.
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DIETER!Excellent!Yeah my professor is saying a lot of names really differently from how I expected it (idk why BTN lists it as 'old german') I am getting over my freaked-out overwhelmedness enough to notice that R's are l's and ch is sh. It was very alarming to hear a German speaker say Friederich Wilhelm. Fleedeleesh Villlem.
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Honestly, as a German speaking person, I don't know where someone would get that weird pronounciation from. R's are R's over here as well and never L's. As for the Ch: It's difficult to explain how it is said, but it's no Sh.
But I guess wikipedia might explain it better than me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_language#Phonology
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Yup.I live in a German area and my boyfriend speaks a smidgen or two of German. Rs are Rs - German is a very harsh language.
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That's what I thought!I was staring at that pronunciation thinking, "Woah, that L's not right!" but I'm just a first-year German student, and I don't know about an 'old German'.
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HmmmI have been saying R further and further back in my mouth all today and eventually it sounds a lot like LMy teacher is a native German, I dunno where he's from in Germany, so I dunno if it's dialectal or something. But it is definitely an R that could be confused with an L. I have been listening intently and he has definitely been saying something that sounds like an L. Probably super-guttural R. I remember paying extra special attention when he said Diederich and thinking "Oh man that is funny because it has Deedle in it why does it have deedle"So I dunno! I am going to listen to him very hard.
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I prefer Diggory or DietrichDietrich because of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer - one of my dad's favorite historical figures and Diggory because of the character in The Magician's Nephew by C.S. Lewis.Diederich (the way you pronounced it) is pretty cool, just not something I'd personally chose. The spelling is a bit complicated, though.
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