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A question about Danish... | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Skandinavisk & Nordisk |  | |
| ruskivyetr Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5480 days ago 769 posts - 962 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Russian, Polish, Modern Hebrew | Message 1 of 11 28 February 2010 at 9:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I was thinking about Danish the other day, and I was thinking about whether or not it had
tones like Swedish and Norwegian. I would think that it's not much of a problem if they didn't as the three languages are mutually intelligible anyway, but I was just wondering as it seem to remember reading somewhere that Swedish and Norwegian have pitch that determines meanings in words, and I wondered why Danish was not mentioned. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6908 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 11 01 March 2010 at 12:25am | IP Logged | |||||
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It's not really that the pitch in Swedish (and Norwegian, I suppose) is there to determine meaning - in some cases it does; while in others, the word is just pronounced that way.
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| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5837 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 3 of 11 01 March 2010 at 11:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I am not too sure about any tones in Swedish. If Swedish has it, so does Danish, but as I said, I have not noticed it. That said, Danish has very interesting pronounciation to say the least.
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| ruskivyetr Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5480 days ago 769 posts - 962 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Russian, Polish, Modern Hebrew | Message 4 of 11 01 March 2010 at 11:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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What I mean is, there are two meanings to the Swedish word anden, no? The only
difference is tone in the syllables. One meaning means duck I'm pretty sure, and I don't know the other one but this is what I'm talking about. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6908 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 11 02 March 2010 at 2:12am | IP Logged | |||||
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Yeah, that's right. There are numerous word pairs where the tone changes the meaning, but to my knowledge Danish doesn't have that feature (and if it does, the prosody isn't as "sing-songy" as Swedish/Norwegian), and the tones aren't just there to change the meaning. Swedish and Norwegian just happen to sound that way. Many words (including first and last names) that are pronounced with one tone take the other in another part of the country. No big deal.
If you're into Danish, I think you're less likely to meet this tone/accent/pitch distinction. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 11 02 March 2010 at 3:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It is commonly said that Swedish and Norwegian have tones, while Danish has a glottal stop ("stød") instead - which in a sense also is a 'tone' thing rather than something like a phoneme. This means that we have a number of words where only the stød/not-stød gives a diference in meaning (for instance "kører" vs. "køer" ('drives' vs. 'cows') or "møller" vs. "Møller" ('mills' vs. the name derived from it). But these phenomena are not used systematically at each and every vowel, i.e. they may be important, but you would still be able to understand Swedish with reduced melody and Danish without stød - as illustrated by Finnish Swedish and Danish from Lolland.
Stress has the same characteristic - it is is best seen as a modification of a string of phonemes rather than a phoneme in its own right in between the others. For instance Danish "Gå til" with stress on "gå" means "go to", while it means "pass away" or "wither" with stress on "til". The big difference between Swedish/Norwegian and Danish is that sentences in the former have a very characteristic melody, while the sentence melody in Danish is more uniform (and with more contractions where isolated words are combined into chunks). 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5837 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 7 of 11 02 March 2010 at 9:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yeah, but English has the same phenomenon. I am too tired to think of any example right now, but there are MANY. Is anyone saying that this is unique for Scandinavian languages? I don't think so? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4827 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 8 of 11 01 June 2012 at 7:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
Slightly ridiculous of me to wake this thread up after >2 years, but just to say I agree that English uses tone quite a lot, although probably not in a very systematic way. We know it when we hear it, but we could not tell you or write down the rules. But meaning can definitely change with tone, and/or emphasis. Just think of the ways we can use "hmmm", to give the simplest example I can think of. Having just started to listen to Danish a bit more seriously, there is definitely a tonal thing going on there, which is quite different to English and presumably different to Norwegian and Swedish (based on what I read here....I could not systematise it myself, unaided). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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