Re: NATLANG ruki-rule in Slavic

Quoting Pavel Iosad <edricson@...>:

> As for Danish, reading it is not an insurmountable task , even with my
> quite limited Swedish. Listening to it, OTOH, is a nightmare. Minimal as
> my experience with spoken Danish is, I can't understand a word, even if
> it's sloooow and simple (unlike Norwegian). Do the Swedes have much
> difficulty understaning the Danes?
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 - there are Swedish dialects that are
worse. A Jutlandish dialect speaker, OTOH, is well nigh totally
incomprehensible to me.

Presumably, the particular Swede who's hearing matters too - I'd guess that
Scanians have easier time than the rest of us. Scania belonged to Denmark till
the mid-17th C, and Scanian is historically the link in the chain between the
dialects of the Danish isles and those of Sweden proper.

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.

                                                              Andreas

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