Scandinavian languages, Danish, articles

At 10:42 AM 8/19/03 +0200, you wrote:
>At 19:07 18.8.2003 +0400, Pavel Iosad wrote:
>
>>As for Danish, reading it is not an insurmountable task ,
>
>No.  There are a few real bad false friends tho, like
>rolig, værelse, væske, taske.
What's wrong with rolig?  (Of course, I had the opportunity to simply
absorb all the semantics of this word by hearing it used very frequently in
all sorts of different contexts)

Værelse I can understand the problem with.  It looks like it ought to mean
"being" and it really means "room."

My Danish is incomplete enough that I had to look up væske og taske, but
now I know what they mean.  What makes these confusing for the Swedish speaker?

>It helps to know the correspondance rules between Swedish and Danish
>orthography and between Danish orthography and pronunciation.
>I have a paper treating the subject somewhere, and have been thinking
>of making a webpage on the subject.
I'd certainly be interested in reading such a paper.  Of course, most of
the rules of correspondence between Danish orthography and pronunciation
are things that I have internalized and now come automatically to me, but
it would still be very interesting to see them laid out
systematically.  And I would be very interested in the correspondances
between Danish and Swedish orthography.


>But Danish as spoken by Icelanders is a separate language called Isdansk! ;)
>In fact they use it as an inter-Scandinavian IAL and most Icelanders
>do consciously **not** strive for a good Danish pronunciation.
Maybe that's a good thing in some ways, if they want to be
understood.  Good Danish pronunciation is awfully blurry.

I've never heard of "Isdansk" before.  So I've learned something else new
-- and am sitting here laughing at the name!

>At 12:58 18.8.2003 -0400, Isidora Zamora wrote:
>
>>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.
>
>Yes.
>
>>But how do you get a definite
>>article by taking that selfsame particle and postfixing it to the
>>noun?
>
>You don't.  The indefinite article is cognate with English _yon/yonder_
>and German _jener_.  Icelandic and Norwegian still have it as an
>independent pronoun _hin(n)/hitt_, meaning "the other one".
Thank you very much for answering my question.  I have been wondering about
this for the last 13 years.

Do you know when the definite and indefinite articles came into their
present forms?

Isidora

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