Confusion Between Similar Languages

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Babbsagg
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby Babbsagg » 2017-04-20, 18:38

It's been some time, but I sometimes manage to tell them apart. If I'm not mistaken, frequent usage of "kj" and "skj" and general usage of "gj" are among the most noticeable things that betray Norwegian. It's funny how they can be difficult to tell apart in written form but are unmistakable in speech.
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby dEhiN » 2017-04-20, 19:22

Car wrote:even my recognition skills have gonegotten/become worse.
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby linguoboy » 2017-04-20, 19:30

Babbsagg wrote:It's funny how they can be difficult to tell apart in written form but are unmistakable in speech.

It makes perfect sense given how underspecified writing systems are when it comes to phonetic detail.
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby Babbsagg » 2017-04-20, 21:06

Yes, I had second thoughts right after posting that. I mean, for example when a Bavarian and someone from Schleswig-Holstein are speaking the difference is striking even though written speech is identical.

Anyway, what I find somewhat confusing about Norwegian and Danish is coherence between written and spoken form. I think Norwegian is pretty consistent in that regard (like Swedish, German, Dutch) while Danish is pronounced very differently to what I'd expect from written form. Yes I know there's a system there, but it seems to break the rules of all surrounding Germanic languages.

That in itself wouldn't be puzzling, but interestingly spoken Norwegian seems to be closer tied to a written language that they actually got from the Danes.
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby linguoboy » 2017-04-20, 22:05

Babbsagg wrote:That in itself wouldn't be puzzling, but interestingly spoken Norwegian seems to be closer tied to a written language that they actually got from the Danes.

You can actually phonemicise Danish in a way that maps pretty closely to the written language. You need to apply some complex phonological rules to get from there to the spoken realisations, but it's more elegant than making the underlying forms complex to begin with.

Written Norwegian has actually been modified quite a bit from its Dano-Norwegian origins. And it's not like written Danish has remained static for all that time either.
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby mōdgethanc » 2017-04-21, 2:12

Babbsagg wrote:It's been some time, but I sometimes manage to tell them apart. If I'm not mistaken, frequent usage of "kj" and "skj" and general usage of "gj" are among the most noticeable things that betray Norwegian. It's funny how they can be difficult to tell apart in written form but are unmistakable in speech.
Swedish has those same clusters and I think Danish does too.
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby Babbsagg » 2017-04-21, 4:39

mōdgethanc wrote:
Babbsagg wrote:It's been some time, but I sometimes manage to tell them apart. If I'm not mistaken, frequent usage of "kj" and "skj" and general usage of "gj" are among the most noticeable things that betray Norwegian. It's funny how they can be difficult to tell apart in written form but are unmistakable in speech.
Swedish has those same clusters and I think Danish does too.

This had always been a gut feeling thing for me, I always thought it was Norwegian if there were those clusters, but yesterday I checked dict.cc with following results:

Word-initally:
"skj": NO: 29 - DA: 3
"kj": NO: 86 - DA: 1
"gj": NO: 86 - DA: 1 (that's no mistake, the results happen to be the same as "kj")

Mid-word:
"skj": NO: 61 - DA: 4
"kj": NO: 207 - DA: 14
"gj": NO: 151 - DA: 4

Swedish does have them too, but that language is easily recognised mostly because of Ä and Ö.
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby Johanna » 2017-04-23, 19:43

Babbsagg wrote:
mōdgethanc wrote:
Babbsagg wrote:It's been some time, but I sometimes manage to tell them apart. If I'm not mistaken, frequent usage of "kj" and "skj" and general usage of "gj" are among the most noticeable things that betray Norwegian. It's funny how they can be difficult to tell apart in written form but are unmistakable in speech.

Swedish has those same clusters and I think Danish does too.

This had always been a gut feeling thing for me, I always thought it was Norwegian if there were those clusters, but yesterday I checked dict.cc with following results:

Word-initally:
"skj": NO: 29 - DA: 3
"kj": NO: 86 - DA: 1
"gj": NO: 86 - DA: 1 (that's no mistake, the results happen to be the same as "kj")

Mid-word:
"skj": NO: 61 - DA: 4
"kj": NO: 207 - DA: 14
"gj": NO: 151 - DA: 4

Swedish does have them too, but that language is easily recognised mostly because of Ä and Ö.

Yeah, Danish doesn't palatalise stuff nearly as much as Swedish and Norwegian, there's the occasional skjorte or gjorde (skjorta and gjorde in Swedish), but mostly they just keep the hard pronunciation of the consonant.

Their palatalisation also works differently, they simply insert a /j/, so <skj> is indeed /skj/, <kj> /kj/, and <gj> /ɡj/. In Swedish those are instead /ɧ/, /ɕ/ and /j/ respectively, while their equivalents in Norwegian are /ʂ/, /ç/ and /j/.

Swedish and Norwegian usually palatalise the same words, but Norwegian still inserts this <j> a lot more since in their orthography they only consider two vowels soft: <i> and <y>. Before those, <sk> defaults to /ʂ/, <k> to /ç/ and <g> to /j/ anyway so there's no need to mark it there.

In our orthography on the other hand, the majority of vowels are considered soft: <e, i, y, ä, ö>, so even if someone is typing Norwegian on a Swedish keyboard or vice versa, it's not too hard to figure out which language it really is by checking whether <skj>, <kj> and <gj> occur before those vowels that are considered hard in Norwegian but soft in Swedish.

One word that sums this up perfectly is the infinitive of the verb "to do".
  • Danish: at gøre, with no palatalisation.
  • Bokmål: å gjøre, with marked palatalisation since <ø> is a hard vowel.
  • Swedish: att göra, with unmarked palatalisation since <ö> is a soft vowel.
It's å gjere / å gjera in Nynorsk.
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby Babbsagg » 2017-04-23, 22:53

That's fascinating, thanks. Talking about this stuff made me consider starting learning Norwegian or Swedish again (probably Norwegian since that was what I once learned on a basic level 20 years ago).

I've been out of touch a bit, but what I found good signs for something being Swedish aside from Ä and Ö was mainly that you'll have many words ending on -A and I have a feeling there are more double LL's and TT's. I don't know if that's really the case, just my gut feeling. Haven't thought about it a lot.
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby Johanna » 2017-04-24, 14:36

We definitely have more words ending in -a than Norwegian in general, but exactly how big that discrepancy is depends on what form of either Nynorsk or Bokmål we look at. There are Nynorsk users who use it almost as much as Standard Swedish does, while in conservative Bokmål it's a very rare thing.

I don't know about <ll> and <tt> compared to <l> and <t>, I haven't really noticed much of a difference in how often they occur. Sure, individual words may have a double consonant in one and a single in the other, but that works both ways.

In any case, if you learn a decent amount of Norwegian, it's not hard to get a good passive understanding of Swedish too :-) Vice-versa is actually a little bit trickier since the dialects in Norway are still in very good health while most people born after 1970 in Sweden speak Standard Swedish with a regional accent and some dialectal words thrown in.
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby Babbsagg » 2017-04-24, 15:32

Thanks for the tips. I decided to just take a few online beginner lessons to refresh my knowledge of Norwegian, and try the same lessons for Swedish (the exact same phrases are used). And find out which whets my appetite more. I'll probably go for Norwegian, and should I be fairly confident at some point, I might try Swedish. I know there's the danger of mixing them up, but on the other hand it should be very easy to learn one if you know the other.

I'm not really sure about the double consonants I mentioned either, maybe that's just imagination. Just was a gut feeling. Maybe just because of a few words like "att" vs. "at". In fact, it makes more sense to just look for att/at instead of thinking about double consonants in other words. Besides, I forgot one of the most obvious differences in written speech: "och" vs. "og". With omnipresent words like those, I think even with very basic knowledge it's almost impossible to confuse the two languages.

As for Nynorsk, back then I tried to get a grasp of it because I found the idea of a "true" Norwegian fascinating. But today I care less about that nostalgic/romanticist stuff and will just ignore it, learning only bokmål.

I also find Icelandic fascinating, but I think I'll refrain from trying that anytime soon, as it seems to be much more complicated than Norwegian/Swedish/Danish.
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby Johanna » 2017-04-24, 16:37

Norwegian actually makes a difference between the infinitive marker, which is å, and the conjunction, which is at. In Swedish both are att, and in Danish both are at.

That's actually a very good way to cross Danish off your list: if you see a bunch of free-standing å, you know it has to be Norwegian. But yeah, unless you know the basics of one, you can't do that in reverse as easily... on the other hand, I think I mentioned the Danish preposition af a couple of pages ago, it's fairly common so it's bound to turn up sooner or later. It's spelt av in Norwegian and Swedish.

As long as you 1) get the basics firmly down in Norwegian first and 2) keep your Swedish to a passive knowledge once you start learning it, you shouldn't mix them up :) And if you take up Norwegian again, you will receive plenty of training from early on in how to keep the dialect you do want to learn apart from the ones you don't ;)


Edit: typo
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby dEhiN » 2017-04-24, 17:34

Babbsagg wrote:Talking about this stuff (has) made me consider starting to learning Norwegian or Swedish again

You could also say "... consider to start learning ...". It sounds non-native when you put two progressive forms together like that.

Johanna wrote:bountd

I figured this was a typo, but d and t aren't close to each other on the keyboard. So on the off chance it's not a typo, I thought I'd correct it! :D


Johanna wrote:And if you take up Norwegian again, you will receive plenty of training (from) early on in how to keep the dialect you do want to learn apart from the ones you don't ;)
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby Babbsagg » 2017-04-24, 17:56

dEhiN wrote:
Babbsagg wrote:Talking about this stuff (has) made me consider starting to learning Norwegian or Swedish again

You could also say "... consider to start learning ...". It sounds non-native when you put two progressive forms together like that.

You're right, it indeed looks a bit awkward. Should've known better. Thanks for the correction.
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-04-25, 2:32

dEhiN wrote:
Babbsagg wrote:Talking about this stuff (has) made me consider starting to learning Norwegian or Swedish again

You could also say "... consider to start learning ...". It sounds non-native when you put two progressive forms together like that.

This isn't grammatical in my dialect, only "consider starting to learn."

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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby dEhiN » 2017-04-25, 5:41

vijayjohn wrote:
dEhiN wrote:
Babbsagg wrote:Talking about this stuff (has) made me consider starting to learning Norwegian or Swedish again

You could also say "... consider to start learning ...". It sounds non-native when you put two progressive forms together like that.

This isn't grammatical in my dialect, only "consider starting to learn."

Interesting. I'm actually not sure if it's used in my dialect either. "Consider starting to learn" is definitely more used, if not solely used, and sounds to me more natural. I think I included "consider to start learning" only because if someone used it, I wouldn't consider it to be breaking any English grammar rules. Not quite sure why. :hmm:
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-04-25, 6:23

Could this be another case of ESL English affecting what you see as grammatical? :P

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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby dEhiN » 2017-04-25, 6:37

vijayjohn wrote:Could this be another case of ESL English affecting what you see as grammatical? :P

Oh it could be! :shock:
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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby księżycowy » 2017-04-25, 9:30

For some reason, I don't like "starting" in that sentence.

To be clear, I agree with Vijay about "...concider to start..."

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Re: Confusion Between Similar Languages

Postby OldBoring » 2017-04-25, 12:53

*consider


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