The Danish potato (was: Re: Chinese Dialect Question)

>Ok, please excuse my extreme ignorance, but what does fortis mean? Also,
>what does a voiceless stop sound like? And, lastly, what do you mean by
>potato? I'm really sorry if my questions seem silly, but I've never had
>a class on linguistics (they don't seem to be interested in offering
>linguistics classes in my high school :-( ).
>
>--
>Jonathan Beagley
Fortuately, Mark and others  have given you an excellent rundown of the
basics of articulatory phonetics (which they didn't teach at my high
school, either.  It wás the first thing they taught me in college,
however.), so I don't have to be the one to answer those
questions.  (Thanks, everybody; you all did a much better job of explaining
than I would have.  And I also learned something about the meaning of lenis
and fortis, which is nice.)

I'll just answer the question about the potato.  I am an American who spent
her senior year in high school as an exchange student in
Denmark.  Somewhere along the line, I am certain that it was before I left
the States, a Scandinavian exchange student whose nationality I cannot
remember told me the following joke (The joke makes more sense if you
understand that the three Scandinavian languages (Danish, Swedish, and
Norwegian) are, to a great degree, mutually intelligible.)  (The joke is
also far funnier if you are in the same room as the person telling it, as
it is a visual joke, but I will try to do my best here.): Danish sounds
like you have a potato in your mouth; Swedish sounds like this [bounce hand
up and down in the air]; and Norwegian sounds like this [bounce hand up and
down in the air a lot higher than previously].

I'll let others who have heard all three languages speak to the validity of
the characterizations.  (I've heard all three languages and think the joke
is quite funny.)  (I suppose that anyone who wants to test the joke can
listen to Scandinavian radio programs over the internet.  I know that
Danmarks Radio  http://www.dr.dk has a great website, and I would assume
that there are similar resources for the other two languages.)

I don't know how John learned about the potato, but that's how I learned
about it.  I strongly suspect that it is a fact well known to every
Scandinavian that the Danish language sounds like you are speaking with a
potato in your mouth.  (Probably a small boiled potato, since, in my
experience, that is almost the only way potatoes are eaten in
Denmark.)  Danish is simply a very blurry-sounding language, thus the
potato joke.

Sorry that this reply is so late in coming.  I got a bit behind on my mail,
and then I went to visit my parents over the weekend and have just come
home now.

Isidora

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