NATLANG ruki-rule in Slavic, Scandinavian languages, Danish

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.

>even with my
>quite limited Swedish. Listening to it, OTOH, is a nightmare.
Not a nightmareto me, but hard, tho mostly I agree with Andreas:
it depends vastly on who's speaking!  I heard a lot of both Danish
and Norwegian as a small child, and that certainly helps, since i
had no prejudices about correctness and spelling then.  However it
may be telling that while I can speak an accented Norwegian I can't
really master a Danish pronunciation.

>Minimal as
>my experience with spoken Danish is, I can't understand a word, even if
>it's sloooow and simple (unlike Norwegian).
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.

>Do the Swedes have much
>difficulty understaning the Danes?
Yes.  I'm atypical in having less difficulty than most.

At 23:15 18.8.2003 +0400, Pavel Iosad wrote:

>True. In my idiot-lect, obviously formed by texbooks, tapes, and
>teachers, it's [x\]. I might try [x] when term starts, let's see what
>happens :-)
Very likely nothing, especially if you have [R] for /r/,
since all [R] dialects are also [x] dialects.  You might
as well point out the fact to the teacher!  >;-)

BTW do you have problems distinguishing [x] and [h]?

At 17:45 18.8.2003 +0200, Andreas Johansson wrote:

>The most easily understandable Danish I've ever heard was from an Icelandic
>minister at a meeting of the Nordic Council; he didn't have the lax
>pronunciation of just about everything common among native Danes.
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.

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".


>(Do native speakers ever even wonder about things like that, or do
>they just accept them?)

/BP 8^)
--
B.Philip Jonsson mailto:melrochX@melroch.se (delete X)
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