Re: Danish was:Re: NATLANG ruki-rule in Slavic

Quoting Isidora Zamora <isidora@...>:

> >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."
"Educated" is part of the key too; someone who spoke slangy "street"
koebenhovnsk would probably be a whole lot harder to understand.

> >  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.
It might've been watered-down dialect, adapted for the ears of other Danes,
perhaps.

> >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.
I can't get past the impression that Danes on average articulate less clearly
than do Swedes and Norwegians. I'm told there's phonetic evidence of this.
What I'm refering to as laxness isn't the lenitions - it's a
general "fuzziness", which affects the vowels as much as the consonants. It's
was gets Danish parodyized as [E:@2:@E:@:E].

                                                       Andreas

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