(They all mean song.) This already tells you a lot: Italian often ends on an “e”, Portuguese often ends on “ão”.
When you look at these:
French - révolution
Spanish - revolución
Portuguese - revolução
Italian - rivoluzione
You already start to see a pattern: the French use “-tion”, the Spanish turn that into “-ción”, the Portuguese use “-ção” and the Italians “-zione”.
These languages all mutate into each other using the same patterns. There are many more patterns, so it would take ages to list them all, but when you know the languages it becomes easy. Besides the extra squiggles the Portuguese use (ão, ãe) they also use lots of “lh” combos. Spanish, of course, has the recognisable “ñ”. Going from Spanish to Portuguese you tend to lose a few letters on the way: persona - pessoa.
[ul]
[li]50 = halvtreds[/li][li]60 = treds[/li][li]70 = halvfirs[/li][li]80 = firs[/li][li]90 = halvfems[/li][/ul]
The -s in the Danish numerals is what is left of sinds, meaning times, which gives us:
[ul]
[li]halvtreds = half before three = two and a half times [twenty][/li][li]treds = three times [twenty][/li][li]halvfirs = half before four = three and a half times [twenty][/li][li]firs = four times [twenty][/li][li]halvfems = half before five = four and a half times [twenty][/li][/ul]
The amount of exposure certainly comes in to it, and I think that for most Norwegians, the situation is very different for Swedish and Danish. I live in Oslo, where there are lots of Swedes, and I hear Swedish so much on a regular basis that I barely register it as something separate from Norwegian anymore. Danish is trickier, and I’m sure some of it has to do with me interacting less with Danes. Still, in the past, I’ve had periods when I’ve spent a lot of time in Copenhagen, and although Danish certainly sounded a lot less bizarre as I got used to it, it never really stopped sounding quite profoundly bizarre indeed to a certain extent (it’s purely a phonetic issue, though, not one of grammar or vocabulary - again, written Danish and Norwegian are practically identical).
I’ll admit that there’s a part of my Norwegian brain that is deeply disturbed by Danes having trouble understanding what I say. I can’t help thinking: “WTF is the problem? I speak a language that in principle is basically the same as yours, the only difference is that I pronounce things correctly, and don’t sound like I hit my head against a lamppost before I opened my mouth. What the heck am I supposed to do? Purposefully enunciate words *less *clearly?”
Well, I guess so, in the sense that if I don’t understand a Dane, then I, as a Norwegian, can ask him to speak more clearly, and then I understand him better. However, if he doesn’t understand me, then me speaking more clearly doesn’t really help, because that just makes me sound more Norwegian, and sounding Norwegian was apparently the problem to begin with. That is, Danish sounds closer to Norwegian when it’s pronounced more clearly, while Norwegian, when pronounced more clearly, just sounds even *less *like Danish, I guess.
Hope that made sense. I would like to see a Dane’s take on it, though.
Yikes. I didn’t mean to start a debate about Chinese characters. My point is that the various dialects of Chinese are all lumped together as one language more for historical/political reasons than linguistic reasons.
It’s true that it’s really easy for the Portuguese to understand Spanish. Spanish pronunciation is more logical, they properly pronounce sounds like the “r”. Portuguese is very consistent though, once you get the hang of it it’s really easy. For example, in Spanish you roll the “rr” in “carro”; in Portuguese it sounds like “ca-ho”. If you weren’t expecting that, a Portuguese speaker saying “carro” would be unintelligible to a Spanish speaker. For a Portuguese speaker, on the other hand, pronouncing the “rr” is not *that * unexpected
It was mentioned upthread, but I’ll just point out again that lots of æ’s and ø’s can mean Norwegian as well as Danish (“not any of the others” is incorrect).
The “new way” is compulsory in school books and government run media. I’m 37 and mix old and new, and I think I use the old way more, but that might be personal bias. I’m deliberately trying to stick to the old way because I disagree with reforming language to make it easier to understand phone numbers read out loud. (The reform was requested by the national telephone company.)
Mainly because there was a time when many white South African children were raised in households where their black (non-native-Dutch-speaking) child care provider(s) were a big influence on their language development.
“Fast track”? No. Once any language acquires a written form, and most people are literate, its development slows down period, and its divergent forms diverge more slowly. The global transport and communications advances of the past fifty years have probably slowed the American/British Englishes divide even more.
If you want to see fast-developing Englishes, look instead to places like Malaysia, where many young people now learn English as their first language (or, in many cases, one of two learned simultaneously in toddlerhood) – but it’s an English that is quite distinct from the “standard” forms most of us are used to (“standard” in quotes, because Malaysian English has its own rigorous standards).
Let’s not forget Serbian and Croatian, which almost all linguist consider the same language, but which are considered separate languages for political purposes. They are written using different alphabets, but wouldn’t be considered different languages if they were part of the same country (and weren’t when they were part of the same country).
IANALinguist, but I would have to guess that since North American English speakers and British Isles English speakers communicate with each other very regularly, and are very frequently exposed to each other’s respective popular culture, written works, movies and so on, they’re not going to diverge very quickly. I’d guess that they’d tend to converge, as people on each side of the pond pick up usages that originated on the other side.
The difference, I guess, between the relative lack of divergence between North American English variants and British Isles English variants, on the one hand, and Dutch/Afrikaans or, say, European French/Canadian French variants/Haitian French, on the other hand, is that in the case of English, there was a sufficiently large and important critical mass of English speakers in both areas, such that each of the areas was continuously talking to the others.
