I don’t speak French, Spanish, Portuguese or Italian, but if you were to hand me a couple of pages written in each language, I would have very little difficulty telling which was which.
I don’t speak Norwegian, Swedish, Danish or Icelandic, either - and if you handed me a text written in each language, I wouldn’t have the faintest idea which was which. Can someone give me some clues - common letter combinations, letters used in one language but not in others, &c - that would let me tell these language apart without needing to actually know any words?
If you see lots of þ and ð, it’s Icelandic.
Heavy on the å and ä? Swedish.
Many an æ and ø? Danish.
Kind of pointy, with extra k’s and t’s (and more importantly, not any of the others): Norwegian.
Mind you, I don’t really read any of them, but that’s a general impression. Note that å isn’t exclusively Swedish, it just seems to have more of them.
Indeed, by some objective measures, you’re exactly right – the languages you mentioned (except, I think, Icelandic) could be considered a single language, one we might call “Scandinavian.”
In his book The Power of Babel, linguist John McWhorter cites this as an example of political influence on what we thick of as a “language”. Urdu and Hindi is another example. Other examples work the other way – when we lump together several languages into “one”, for political/historial reasons.
But the bigger lesson is that the language/dialect boundary is quite fuzzy and arbitrary.
Or Norwegian and, mind you, there are two variants of written Norwegian: Bokmål and Nynorsk. Bokmål is rather close to Danish, but one way of separating them is that words like station and others with the combination -ti- or -si-, are spelt -sj- in Bokmål. A good way to identify Nynorsk is words that start with wh- in English, e.g. who and what, are spelt kv-, kvem and kvad.
The three differ in intonation, grammar and vocabulary. You can only consider them a single language if you don’t care about speakers of the main dialects being unable to understand each other.
Yes, it’s easy for me to understand Swedish and Danish when enunciated clearly, but linguistically ungifted Scandinavians have been known to turn to English to communicate with each other, and I’m not talking about individuals with uncommon dialects and lousy enunciation.
Norwegians have a tendency to think “I can understand written Danish and most clearly enunciated spoken Danish, except the weird numbers, so I’ll make the effort.” Then the Dane responds with “I’m sorry, I don’t speak German.” and the Norwegian is offended. (Or even worse, I’m sorry, “I don’t understand Swedish”! Oh, the humanity!)
The best “opposite” example is Chinese. What we call dialects in Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.) are actually totally different languages, most being mutually unintelligible. They’re considered a single language because they all use the same written language. They can get away with this because written Chinese is pictographic; the characters have no connection with how the word sounds.
That’s not really true. From here: “Semantic-phonetic compounds represent around 90% of all existing characters and consist of two parts: a semantic component or radical which hints at the meaning of the character, and a phonetic component which gives a clue to the pronunciation of the character.”
What weird numbers? When I spent six weeks in Denmark, everyone under the age of 35 said femti fem (for fifty five) instead of something like fem og halv tres (literally, five and half of the third [twenty]). Since that was 40 years ago, it should now apply to everyone under 75.
That’s irrelevant as this point only pertains to the origin of the characters. For instance, 海, which means “sea” is formed of a radical, 氵, which means “water” and a body, 毎, which originally pointed to the pronunciation. However, whether you’re writing in Mandarin, Cantonese, Shangainese, Korean (the old-fashioned way) or Japanese, you write “sea”, 海, regardless of how each of these languages pronounce the word.
If it weren’t for simplified characters, written formal Cantonese and Mandarin are essentially the same, even though speakers of each language would not be able to understand each other should they read the same text aloud. When writing colloquial Cantonese, there are different characters for words that differ from Mandarin, but the point that the written language is largely the same holds true for formal texts.
There are some phonetic clues in Chinese characters, but it’s nowhere near reliable enough to make much of a guess of how to pronounce an isolated character, much less read phonetically.
It’s kind of like how English has lots of Latin roots, but if you didn’t already know what was going on, you probably wouldn’t be able to figure out what a “television” is based on roots alone. There are connections, but nowhere not enough to be useful.
So are you saying that I’m wrong, and the characters have NO connection with how the words sounds, as Diceman expressed it? Because otherwise, I think you’re inferring things I’m not saying. I never said you can look at a character and know how it was pronounced, and I never said the same character was pronounced the same way in all so-called dialects. Merely that the statement that the characters were 100% arbitrary with regard to sound wasn’t true.
Well, sorta. It works at least some of the time across multiple dialects and even Japanese. Some characters seem to have zero relationship to the “pronunciation” radical and others have a lot.
“sea” in Mandarin, Shanghaiese and Japanese actually are reasonably “hai” “hey” & “kai”. There are plenty of other characters such as “phone” 电话 that are close enough between canto, Mandarin, Shanghaiese and Japanese (sorry, I don’t understand any Korean). Roughly "denwah, dianhua, diwu, denwu…
I’ll be the first to admit it’s a crapshoot but odds are much greater than random.
I’m only 37, and on all my visits to Denmark shop keepers have given the amount to pay in the old manner. And no, I didn’t only get served by ancients.
To add another datapoint: My cousin’s son, who’s in his early twenties, “pære dansk” (as Danish as you can get) and apparently not retarded in any way, isn’t quite certain about this “treogsytti”/“syttitre” or “femogåtti”/“åttifem” thingy. He’s a lot more comfortable with “treoghalvfjers” and “femogfirs” and suchlike.
I have never heard “femtifem” instead of “fem og halvtreds” unless the person I’ve been talking to wanted to be kind to the foreigner.
On the other hand, if we turn back to Norwegian there was a reform some time in the fifties to start using “femtifem” instead of “fem og femti”, but old habits die hard and many people still do it the old way. It would be interesting to know how usage differs between age groups.
Schoolchildren (at least in the state system) are still taught the traditional number system. Interestingly, the older 50kr banknotes used to state ‘femti kroner’, but the new ones now show ‘halvtreds kroner’. I have not heard anyone using non-Danish numbering unless in conversation with a Swede or Norwegian.
