what do you think of Scandinavian languages?

Hopeful   Wed Nov 16, 2005 2:45 pm GMT
I am from Norway and my first language is Norwegian (bokmål)
I can understand Swedish and Danish very well too, and I understand a little Icealndic (it´s nearly the same as Old Norse)

I have heard people who have taken Norwegian for being Swedish, Danish etc and Swedish for being Danish

What do you think of the Scandinavian languages? (Finnish language is not an Indo-European language and not related to the other languages in Scandinavia, so I don´t understand it)

beautiful?

harsh (like other Germanic languages)?

do they sound similar?

etc
Saif   Wed Nov 16, 2005 5:02 pm GMT
I learnt Swedish nearly 30 years ago and haven't been back to Scandinavia for 25. Beautiful language - easy forn English-speaker to learn, and to forget.

Query - what with Landsmaal and Bokmaal differences, what is used in the armed forces? I heard the Norwegian Navy uses English (like the Belgian Navy). Do you know anything about this?
Hopeful   Wed Nov 16, 2005 5:54 pm GMT
I don´t know so much about the Norwegian navy, but Bokmål is the most used one
I both learned Bokmål and Nynorsk (landsmål) at school, like all in Norway
Mitch   Wed Nov 16, 2005 8:19 pm GMT
Hopeful,

I've always liked the Scandinavian languages. Danish definitely sounds different from Swedish and Norwegian. If I listen closely, Swedish sounds a litlle different from Norwegian--perhaps a little more articulated, and a touch more "sing-song."

Saif and others have said that Swedish (and the others, besides Icelandic) are easy to learn for an English speaker. The grammar certainly seems much more straightforward than German, but the pronunciation is another story. And standard German fits the orthography rather well, while Swedish and the others are a little complicated. Or am I getting scared off too easily? (And is it best to start with Swedish, since it has the largest population and the most material to read and watch?)
nico   Wed Nov 16, 2005 8:48 pm GMT
As a french person, it is difficult to make a difference between norwegian, swedish and danish. In fact, i can't represent it to me mentally. I have been to Denmark, it sounded very different compared to France, but the phonetic was nice, especially women!
Hopeful   Wed Nov 16, 2005 9:51 pm GMT
I agree with the fact that Swedish sounds more sing-song-ish (that´s why I love Swedish!) than Norwegian and Danish (Danish sounds more like German)
Guest   Wed Nov 16, 2005 10:11 pm GMT
I can tell you the Scandinavian languages to me sound much nicer then the harsher German and Dutch languages. Well that what I think.
Hopeful   Wed Nov 16, 2005 10:46 pm GMT
I agree that German sounds harsher, but is Dutch so harsh?
Brennus   Wed Nov 16, 2005 11:11 pm GMT
They are not at all unpleasant sounding. From a historical perspective however, I find Icelandic the most interesting of the Scandinavian languages just as Dalmatian and Romanian are the most interesting among the Romance languages and Galatian would probably be among the Celtic languages if it were still alive.
Guest   Wed Nov 16, 2005 11:50 pm GMT
<I agree that German sounds harsher, but is Dutch so harsh? >

yeah I would put it that Dutch is harsher than German. Someone told me English can be harsh at times depending on accent.
Travis   Thu Nov 17, 2005 1:36 am GMT
The main things that make Dutch "harsher" than German is that it has /G/ where German has /x/ and /g/, and that it has /sx/ where German has /S/. Besides these two points, I don't really see much in the way of any particular reasons why Dutch would be any really "harsher" than German, even though non-native learners of Dutch, such as natively English-speaking ones, might fight some of its diphthongs rather weird, as opposed to the diphthongs in standard Hochdeutsch, which are very familiar to, say, most native English-speakers.
Hopeful   Thu Nov 17, 2005 1:59 am GMT
I have also noticed that English can be hard, and I have actually heard an english sentence pronounced and thought "that sounds like German!"
So English sounds more Germanic than Romantic in pronounciations
Travis   Thu Nov 17, 2005 3:11 am GMT
In phoneme inventory and distribution, German and English are not that different from each other, considering that the main differences are:

German has rounded front vowels (which some Scottish English dialects also have; note that some other English dialects also have centralized but not fully fronted vowels)
/s/ and /z/ in German are highly restricted in their distribution, constrasting only intervocalically
/s/ and /S/ also are highly restricted in their distributions
German has /x/ (/C/), corresponding to Middle English /x/, which is only conserved in Scottish English dialects
German has the affricate /ts/, whereas /ts/ is a consonant cluster in English
German generally has /OY/ where English has /oI/
German never reduces /t/ or /d/ to [4] or [?] in places, unlike many English dialects

Most English dialects lack full word-final devoicing, but only have it partially (even though the details of such are dialect-specific)
The Germanic long-short vowel correspondence has been reduced in many English dialects to primarily a lax-tense vowel correspondance, in particular in North American English dialects
English has /{/ (in some dialects /a/ or /e@/) and /A/ (in some dialects /O/ or /a/) where German has /a/ and /a:/, respectively
English natively has the fricatives /T/, /D/, /Z/ and the affricate /dZ/, which German lacks; German lost /D/ (corresponding to Old English /T/) during the early Old High German period
English has /v/, /w/, and in some dialects /W/; German lacks /W/ completely, and German dialects have either /v/ or /w/ rather than both, standard Hochdeutsch /v/ corresponding to Middle High German and modern Upper German /w/
Various German dialects have a three-way division between /E/, /e/, and /E:/, while English dialects generally only have a two-way division between /E/ and /e/.

All things considered, beyond this, the differences in phoneme inventory and distribution alone between English and German are not that pronounced. Probably what is more important is general enunciation, in that English tends to *not* actually separate adjacent words from each other with respect to syllabification, and also the circumstances in which glottal stops are placed before words starting in vowels is generally far more limited than in German, where such is usually the rule (for example, my own dialect only places glottal stops before words starting in vowels if they are at the beginning of something being said or follow another a word ending in a vowel, and the latter is not consistent, either). Similarly, English seems to tend more strongly in practice towards vowel reduction, assimilation, and elision than German, even though of course such appear to occur far more heavily in actual spoken German than one would think from the standard Hochdeutsch taught in schools here.
The Swede   Thu Nov 17, 2005 9:50 am GMT
I would like to say that Norwegian sounds more sing-song than Swedish. But I know and has also heard some Norwegians dialects and some of them sounds not sing-song at all. But for example the Norwegian primeminister he has a more singsong accent than almost every Swede have. It´s my view of it. I have also heard, sometimes here and also in some other situations, that many Scandinavians sounds like they more sing English than talking it. I have heard that some Swedish managing directors speaking English and they speak more Swenglish, and it sound awful for me as a Swede, it´s almost a bit embarrasing that they are Swedes. Ok they have great vocabulary, but I have rather a better accent than a larger vocabulary.
Walker, Texas Ranger   Thu Nov 17, 2005 3:03 pm GMT
The Swede, jag håller helt klart med om att det nästan är lite pinsamt ibland när man hör somliga tala engelska på TV, Göran Persson t.ex. Men så är det ju i och för sig med många "viktiga" kostymnissar man ser på nyheterna, från andra länder än Sverige menar jag. Men visst, ibland kan man nästan avgöra varifrån i Sverige de kommer genom att lyssna på deras engelska.

<I agree with the fact that Swedish sounds more sing-song-ish (that´s why I love Swedish!) than Norwegian and Danish (Danish sounds more like German)>

Hopeful, jag håller även här med The Swede. Jag tror nog att de flesta svenskar tycker att norska är mycket mer sing-song än svenska. Om det är någon svensk dialekt som verkligen har en "hoppande" intonation (som i norska) så skulle jag vilja påstå att det är Västgötska (Västergötland). Särskilt i slutet på meningar går tonen på rösten ofta upp väldigt mycket i norska, till exempel då ni (ganska ofta) avslutar meningar med "då", icke sant? :)