Danish was:Re: NATLANG ruki-rule in Slavic

>That depends alot on the particular Danes speaking. An educated Copenhagener
>is not particularly hard to understand if he/she makes a bit of an effort to
>speak reasonably slowly and clearly
I'm a little surprised that you don't have much difficulty with
Copenhageners, because koebenhovnsk is more or less what I speak.  There's
a lot of glottalization in that dialect, and I would have thought that that
would create a problem.  (People have told me that sjaelandsk has more
glottal stops.)  I think the key must be "speaks reasonably slowly and
clearly."

>  A Jutlandish dialect speaker, OTOH, is well nigh totally
>incomprehensible to me.
I didn't get to travel hardly at all within the country, so I haven't
really heard jysk.  Though I have seen Babettes Gaesebud, and presumably
the dialog (that wasn't in French or Swedish) must have been in some form
of vestjysk.  I didn't really have trouble with it.  (I had to listen
really hard to the Swedish, though -- and sometimes keep an eye on the
English subtitles.)  Though, the thing is, I already speak one dialect of
Danish, so it is perhaps not so difficult for me to listen to another
dialect.

>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.
"Lax" would certainly be the word that you're looking for here.  I really
think that a lot of that laxity is simply built into modern Danish
phonology.  There is an awful lot of lenition (and an awful lot of glottal
stops, some of them replacing stop consonants).  Lots of /g/'s turn to
/j/'s and then go on to help form dipphthongs.  I think the vowels have
shifted somewhat.  (Otherwise how do you get /leg/ --> [laj] ?)   (I think
Danish is much more regular to spell than Modern English, but the
orthography is anything but transparent.)  The alveolar stops tend to be
very weak (or very strange) unless they are word-initial.  So some of the
"laxity" is simply a fact of life.  But, OTOH, there is just plain old
sloppiness e.g. saying "Det ve' je' ig' " when what the speaker should have
said was, "Det ved jeg ikke."  But there is never going to be a [t] on the
end of 'det' and the /k/ in 'ikke' is always going to be pronounced as [g],
and that final /e/ will always be nearly elided in that particular
word.  But young Danes especially, in my experience, don't speak as
carefully as they could.  (But then, the same is really true of the
majority of Americans.  We really have a schwa problem over here.  I've
tried to work on my vowel pronunciation so that my children will learn to
speak nicely.  So far, it seems to be working; when I teach my daughter her
spelling words, we have relatively little confusion over which vowel to use
in an unstressed syllable, which means that I am not pronouncing the words
with a completely neutalized vowel, and she learning a UR of the words with
the correct vowels, because she doesn't pronounce the vowels as complete
schwas either.)

Isidora

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