And as far as I know, unlike, say, German or French, we don’t have a whole lot of words or names from Scandanavian languages that have become common in English, so that it would be useful for knowing the pronunciation rules that apply to them in their language of origin.
No. No they don’t. I don’t know a single Danish person who has to struggle to speak Danish.
The rest of us Scandi people do have some problems understanding Danish, but that’s another issue.
Swedish person here.
I see that your avatar is “español,” @Jagraze1. You are aware, I trust, that Spanish consonants change how they are pronounced depending on the vowel that follows. C can be a theta sound or an S (depending on location) as well as a K sound. Same goes for G. But I’m sure you knew that.
And take Italian. G followed by a vowel will change as well. The H in spaghetti is because of the e. Without the H, it’d be [spajetti]. And of course the same happens with the C. Add an H and you get a hard K sound.
English does this as well. A car and a circle. The C sounds different.
In fact, most European languages follow the same rules/logic, and it all depends on the vowels. AOU are ‘hard vowels’ so at the most basic level consonants that are followed by one of those will take on a hard sound (e.g. K for C). EI(Y) are soft vowels so the preceding consonant will be whatever the local variant of soft is.
Actually, they are. For a given value of popular. More kids in (German equivalent of) high school study Swedish, than there are Swedish high schoolers that study German. In both cases it’s for extra credit, not mandatory. I’ve met people who (to my amazement) study Swedish at uni level in Croatia. It’s a small-ish language, but there is some interest.
How far back do you want to go? Because the era of Danelaw sure contributed a lot.
What about the word: Jonköping, a place in Sweden?
What about it? I’ve never encountered it or needed to knpow how it was pronounced.
It’s pronounced:
Yon-shop-ing
If you want to learn to read a language, pronunciation doesn’t matter. If you want to learn to speak a language, you can still be understood with a number of mispronunciations. Even if you just don’t get the phonetics right, all it means is that you have an accent.
I would have mispronounced the k in Jonköping. I bet Swedes encounter this all the time, and are used to it. I can’t even pronounce British English or Castilian Spanish correctly, since I learned to speak in California.
Yes. It’s exactly the same phenomenon as Latin “C” [k] becoming palatalised before front vowels and ending up as [tʃ] in Italian. For example cera (wax) would be ke:ra in Classical Latin and tʃe:ra in Italian.
When did it happen? Probably after we borrowed Norse ki- and ski- words into English. We have “skin” and “kid” in English (not “shin” and “chid”).
In a completely separate process, Germanic sk- words became sh- in German, Dutch and English but remained as sk- in Nordic languages (sko - shoe). Compare the Norse borrowing “skirt” and the native English word “shirt”.
Edited to add: actually in Dutch it’s [sx], in English and German it’s [ʃ]. English/German ʃu:, Dutch sxu:n, Swedish sku:
Not only are they not widly spoken, they aren’t widely studied in English speaking countries.
Poking around online, it looks like about 20% of K12 US students learn a foreign language, and that Spanish is the most widely taught.
Scandi languages didn’t make the (top?) 20 included in this study, which
even included, for example, Turkish:
For people of my generation, the only exposure to a Nordic language was learning that A Møøse once bit my sister
That’s in the Iraqi dialect, which has nothing to do with the name of Qatar. In standard Arabic, k is /k/ and q is /q/. Two different sounds. K is a velar stop and q is a uvular stop.
Yes.
And ?
I only know 2 words in Swedish, “Dansk jevlar” (Danish scum), and that’s only because that’s what the Swedish character Stig Helmer shouts at the top of his lungs in Lars von Trier’s TV series Riget (The Kingdom). While one of those words does have the K referenced in the OP, unfortunately it is in a context/usage (sk) entirely familiar to English speakers.
It’s a loanword from Swedish
That should be Danskdjävlar. Djävlar doesn’t mean scum. Djävel (sing) is cognate of devil, I’d translate that as “Wretched Danes.” If someone translated Riget to The Kingdom, they did a poor job. Rige is cognate to Reich in German and Rike in Swedish. I’d say realm is the closest in English. However, Riget is the colloquial name for Rigshospitalet, so that’d be Hospital of the Realm. It functions as the sort of ‘main’ hospital i Denmark. The most important research, the most difficult cases ASF.
What is? Jönköping is the name of a town and a county in the center south of Sweden. I’m not aware of it being used in any other way. M-W lists it as a geographical name. OED doesn’t list it.
There is a city in Turkey called Batman (Pop. 450K). Do you think the comic character was named for that City?
I should’ve remembered the umlaut, but jävlar seems to be the word part?
I did realize it because I knew someone who grew up near the Norwegian town of Kirkenes, which he pronounced something like Sheer-kuh-ness. Note the two Ks have different values, although both i and e are front vowels.
Finally, someone realized this. Yeah you’re right, K in Norwegian indeed does take a soft value if it occurs before letters I, J and Y and probably also the clusters Ei and Øy.
[Moderating]
Whatever this is, it’s not a Factual Question.
Moving to MPSIMS.
All I know is that I feel like a fool for wearing this shirt for so long.
Are you upset because you realized you were wrong?
Maybe cause Scandinavia is mis-spelled or because it came from K-mart.