Welcome to
Joachim Breitner's Homepage

A lot of people outside Germany, including here in Ghana, can't pronounce my name right (whereas right is what I'm used to...). So I looked through the German wikipedia and tried to figure out how to write my name in the IPA. The result is:

If you don't have unicode available, this will probably look strange to you. All these sounds have strange names, here they are:

• j: palatal approximant / Stimmhafter palataler Approximant
• ɔ: open-mid back rounded vowel / Gerundeter halboffener Hinterzungenvokal
• a: open front unrounded vowel / Ungerundeter offener Vorderzungenvokal
• χ: voiceless uvular fricative / Stimmloser uvularer Frikativ
• ɪ: near-close near-front unrounded vowel / Ungerundeter zentralisierter fast geschlossener Vorderzungenvokal
• m: bilabial nasal / Stimmhafter bilabialer Nasal

And yes, it is the same letter χ as in Teχ, but not the same pronounciation, which is tɛx.

Update: I had to convert my serendipity blog to UTF8 to make this entry right. Did so by mysqladmin dump'ing the whole database and running it through iconv, and then re-inputting it. Sorry to any planets that had a broken entry for a while. Maybe this update paragraph makes these planets update the entry :-)

Update 2: As I'm already showing of with unicode characters: The name Joachim is derived from Jehoiakim (Jojakim in German), which is Hebrew and looks like this: יהוֹיָקִים