[Ea]

Originally Posted by TGS

Excellent idea

Well it's not really my language, but my adopted language has 28 or 29 letters, it adds three extra letters to the standard Roman "English" alphabet - æ ø å. In a dictionary the come in that order after -z-. The reason that it's uncertain whether there are 28 or 29 letters in the alphabet - according to my Danish teacher - is that there are no Danish words with -w- so although you will see -w- written in Denmark all the words featuring a -w- are imported words. So Danish itself doesn't have a -w- therefore, the argument goes -w- is not part of the Danish alphabet.

You think that's complicated, you want to try pronouncing it!

It helps if you've grown up here

I haven't actually ever thought about if there's 28 or 29 letters - I've just been taught there's 28. I've seen V and W categorised as the same letter in libraries (don't know if it's common).

'æ' and 'ø' are actually from medieval times - transcriptions of 'ae' and 'oe'.

An interesting thing is that we actually have two 'ø' wovel sounds. I think they correspond to the 'eu' and 'oe' sounds in French. TGS; try to pronounce 'løve' and 'høne' (lion and hen).

Originally Posted by omk3

...

I did listen to the Danish words though, and if the software works as it should, I am shocked and fascinated by "rødgrød med fløde" and whoever manages to pronounce it! Wow!

This made me remember an interesting study that I had watched in a documentary, and I managed to find a relevant article. Experiments have shown that as babies we can recognise all the little nuances in sound and differentiate between them. We lose however this ability very early on: As we are getting better and better in our native language's sounds, we start ignoring the rest.
...

So when two foreign words sound exactly the same to you, while a native speaker insists that they are totally different, you now know why. This doesn't explain why some people manage to have very convincing accents in foreign languages later in life, while others never can, though. A (musical) friend suggested once to me that it has to do something with having a musical ear, but I'm not sure. I'm rubbish at music, myself, but probably better than average in accents.

the 'soft' d is really just the 'th' sound spoken very softly. If you notice the configuration of your moth and tongue while pronouncing it, you just need to push your tongue a little closer to the teeth (almost touch them).

About sounds; I read recently that Arabic languages has 3 wovel sounds, Spanish has 5, English has 14, German has 21 - and Danish has 24 or 25. It's no wonder that it can be a difficult language to learn.

Originally Posted by TGS

The relationship between the language we use and the way we carve up the world - the categories we use - is fascinating. Prepositions are one of the weirdest language features and the way the prepositions in English do not quite map on to the prepositions in Danish cause me as a non-native Danish speaker, and the Danish people I teach English to no end of problems. English has far more prepositions than Danish and uses them in weird ways - why might you be "on" a bus but "in" a car for example, but in Danish be "på" a bus and also be be "på" work (if you ask Google på translates as "at")?

Yep! That's one of my main problems (and remembering that verbs in third person singular is different - don't vs. doesn't). For example, I've had to memorise you sit at the table, not by the table (if I remember right...)

Originally Posted by FlorenceArt

...

It looks like in this matter, France is following in the steps of Scandinavia and, more recently, Germany. My sister lived in Denmark for a few months, and she told me that nobody uses the equivalent of "tu" any longer, except when talking to the King (which incidentally my sister didn't do ). And I seem to see "Du" in German used much more often than "tu" in French, on magazine covers or ads, or here in the MR forum.

Ah... It's the other way round. We "tu-er" ("du") each other and rarely use the equivalent for ''vous" ("De") (except royalty of course). And unless your sister was in Denmark prior to 1972, she would have had not even a theoretical chance to speak with the king (unless she's medium) - since the old king died then, and our current monarch is a queen

Originally Posted by TGS

Danish has a word "hyggelig" (which is pronounced something like "who'kerly" would be in English - if you can imagine that), which so far as I can tell has no equivalent in any language. The meaning of the word has something to do with atmosphere - it is often translated as cosy, but that's not quite right, it is broader than cosy. One can be hyggelig sitting with friends on a hot summer day drinking a few beers. One can also be hyggelig alone - imagine getting home on a dark cold winter evening, your house is warm, you make some hot chocolate, light some candles, wrap yourself up in a blanket, take out you liseuse and become pleasurably absorbed in reading - that's hyggelig. One can be hyggelig at a big party, or a small dinner. The pursuit of hyggelig, creating hyggelig, finding occasions for hyggelig seems to underpin much of life in Denmark.

I'm not sure if any of our Danish colleagues are contributing to this thread, but if they are maybe they have a go at defining it. Ultimately I think it is a word which, if you are Danish you know what it means, but if you are not Danish you will never really get it.

I think you got it quite right. Cosy covers some of it, but it's also generally about having a nice time in whatever way you want. It can also be said with a "nudge-nudge, wink-wink" inflection. It's a thoroughly positive word - I can't think of a negative use for it. And 'hygge' is a very 'democratic' notion (not sure how to explain this, but it feels like it. Wealth or rank would never enter into an explanation of hygge.

TGS, do you know the song "Svante's lykkelige dag" by Benny Andersen? that's very much about 'hygge' (btw, 'hygge' is the noun, and 'hyggelig' is ... can't remember the term, sorry - you're the language teacher... )
Here's the song, sung by Povl Dissing (who was rather controversial back in the 70's because of his style - you either hate him or love him - but it's really just blues-style):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhrPg...eature=related

The refrain in translation:
Life is not the worst that one got,
And in a little while the coffee will be ready.
(edit, note: he uses 'life'(livet) or 'happiness'/'luck'(lykken) or 'joy'(glæden) in different stanzas)

That is hygge at an advanced level.
(the Scandinavian countries are in the top three with regards coffee consumption per capita world-wide... coffee is very much hygge - and food and alcohol, too - eating and drinking together...)

Originally Posted by Freeshadow

ArcticBoy, you reminded me of something i once heared about Swedish and Danish: it was the statement that a swedish-speaker would be able to understand danish but not the other way around.

It's probably both ways. I've heard from both Norwegians and Swedes that they find Danish difficult, because we do inflections (I think it's called) in a rather unique way. There's not a lot of ups and downs in the sound of Danish, and few obvious stops, so to a foreign ear, it sound rather like lots of mumbling.

Instead, in Danish, 'stød' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%B8d), a sort of glottal stop or stress on parts of words, is used as a kind of inflection. This is probably the hardest part of Danish for a foreigner to learn, and unless we get them from and early age, they rarely manage Seriously, almost all who've learned Danish as adults will never get this quite right, even if their general pronunciation are good and they can pronounce "rødgrød med fløde"
Edit, added: Germans can get it 'right', and Dutch come right behind them
Edit 2: I wrote "...their general pronunciation is good..." - fecking English third person singular... LOL