Re: Scandinavian Languages

At 08:51 PM 8/18/03 +0200, you wrote:
>At the BEGINNING of _sju_? Foreigners are supposed to have trouble with the
>vowel, not the consonant, of that ...
Is that a high front rounded vowel?  (I ask because the Danish is syv.)  If
so, then I can imagine foreigners haivng trouble with it.  It took me some
time to get it right, and I simply can't get my daughter to pronounce
it.  Often, she won't even try.

>The consonant depends on dialect - mine have [x^w], which is pretty common.
>That labialization isn't phonemic by the way - I have it before rounded
>vowels, some people have it everywhere and skipping it totally shouldn't be a
>problem. Some dialects, eg in Finland, have [S] or [S^w]. Some have [x\], and
>for some reason textbooks are prone to give that or [S].
>
>(In case you're unfamiliar with the phonetic transcription I'm using (X-
>SAMPA), [x] is "ch" as in German "Bach", [S] is "sh" as in English "fish" and
>[x\] are those two pronounced simultaneously. [^w] indicates labialization of
>the previous sound.)
Thank you for the explanation.  I have heard the sound pronounced a long
time ago (before I had the linguistic training to catagorize things) and
have since wondered if it was some sort of palatal fricative (or
palatalized velar).  Now I know.  (BTW, learning to coarticulate [x] and
[S] could take a considerable amount of practice for some foreigners to
acheive.:)

> > Does anyone have any idea how the definitite and indefinite articles in
> > Scandinavian languages arose?  I have been wondering about this since my
> > first week in Denmark.  The indefinite article is transparent.  It's simply
> > the word for "one" with gender marking placed in front of the
> > noun.  Spanish and French do the same thing.  But how do you get a definite
> > article by taking that selfsame particle and postfixing it to the
> > noun?  (Do native speakers ever even wonder about things like that, or do
> > they just accept them?)
>
>This one sometimes wonders, but does not know. I would put too much money on
>the suffixed definites being in origin the same as the indefinites - Icelandic
>_-inn_ would seem to suggest something else.
Thank you for bringing the Icelandic into it.  I know very little of
Icelandic (other than having been told that it is a very conservative
language in many ways and having seen a noun paradigm or two in the
phonology textbook that I am currently reading), and you're right, the
Icelandic suffix might point to a separate origin for the definites.  In
any case, it always struck me as odd to put one of the articles in front of
the noun and to attatch the other article to the back end of the
noun.  (Not that I have any trouble actually doing it.  I do it correctly
without even thinking about it.)

Isidora

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