Re: French

2009/1/22 Ina van der Vegt <gijsstrider@...>

> When we go to spoken, however, High German becomes much more
> comprehensible while the Norse-Germanic language lose
> comprehensibility. Even so, the Norse-Germanic languages still sound
> more familiar, even when I don't understand them it sounds like I
> should. High German that's not understood is immediately categorized
> as foreign language stuff, not so with the Norse-Germanic parts I
> don't understand, where my mind spends much more time trying to figure
> out what it means, because it sounds like I should know.
>
I, a non-native but nearly fluent Dutch speaker of French origin (I say
"nearly" because I still can't get all my common gender and neuter nouns
right ;) ), will never forget the time I was watching the news, and a woman
was interviewed on the Dutch TV who spoke in a Dutch dialect so weird I
could not make out what she said without the subtitles (Dutch TV tends to
subtitle people speaking in dialects, even when those are relatively easy to
understand). Still, I always felt at the edge of understanding, and thus
thought it was probably just a difficult dialect (there are enough of those
here in the Netherlands). So when I asked my husband which Dutch dialect the
woman was speaking, imagine my surprise when he replied that she was
speaking Swedish!

So I'm very happy to hear that at least one native speaker has a similar
experience. My husband (native Dutch speaker) tells me that he understands
the basics of Swedish, although he never studied it. He has more difficulty
with Danish and Norwegian, which sound much more foreign to him. I tend to
agree, although I have a Danish colleague, and when he is speaking Danish to
another Danish colleague it always takes me a while before I recognise that
he is not speaking Dutch. The stød does help (his stød is a strong creaky
voice, which makes his speech very un-Dutch-like).
-- 
Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.

http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/
http://www.christophoronomicon.nl/

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