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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5344 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 161 of 299 25 October 2013 at 8:13am | IP Logged | |||||
I should perhaps also be more specific. In cross country skiing we need to beat everyone, in most other sports we are happy just to beat the Swedes. The good side is that in sports where we do not do well, like in football, we are happy to chear for the Swedes :-) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6713 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 162 of 299 25 October 2013 at 9:31am | IP Logged | |||||
It is all dependant on the opportunities we have for using our languages. I can always find something to read and mostly also something sensible to listen to in all my languages, and I know from my vocabulary counts that I have a decent passive vocabulary even in some of the languages which I only have listed as 'studies'. For instance I have recently returned from South Africa, where I used field guides in Afrikaans and read local newspapers and magazines without any problems. I can also understand most of the content in the podcasts from Radio sonder Grense (my reading skills always will be better than my listening skills in any language, and I haven't listened enough yet). But I can't speak Afrikaans fluently, and I still need a dictionary when I write in this language. It is fairly certain that a week or so where I really got the chance to speak Afrikaans would kick it up into at least B1, maybe B2 actively, but with an English/German-speaking tourgroup I simply didn't get the chance, except in a couple of cases in shops. With languages like Italian and Spanish I have done travels on my own and I have a much longer history of listening and reading in these languages, so even though I do make errors and sometimes lack words I can say - based on facts - that I can live a fairly normal life as a tourist in the relevant countries, speaking as much and about the same themes I would speak about in English in an Anglophone country. So my proficiency may be lower than in English, but my fluency isn't. So above a certain level of proficiency fluency is all about exposure, expoosure and once again exposure. Edited by Iversen on 25 October 2013 at 12:42pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4263 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 163 of 299 25 October 2013 at 10:34am | IP Logged | |||||
I don't have any references for you but at one of the lectures at Helsinki university the professor in linguistics said roughly that they're the perfect examples of languages with an army and a navy and how they differ from one another less than many "languages" that are considered as dialects of the same language. This was in the topic of "how arbitrary it is to fight over what is a language and what is a dialect" but I think he meant that the general idea is that scientifically speaking it makes much more sense to think of them as dialects. The idea is that most distinct languages are formed when the dialect continuum breaks and the different parts drift into separate directions, but the Scandinavian dialect continuum is very unfragmented; and isn't it silly that almost everyone admits that there are dialects of Swedish that are somehow closer to Norwegian? All in all it's not black and white but in some cases when science is considered it makes more sense to do something differently than in the "actual world". 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6713 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 164 of 299 25 October 2013 at 11:10am | IP Logged | |||||
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As I have written before the notions of language and dialect are as much political and administrative as founded on linguistic hardcore facts. But in the long run political and administrative forces will cause linguistic facts, and the Scandinavian languages are a good example of this. For instance the thing spoken in Skåne (Scania) until the Swedish conquest was a Danish dialect with clear relations to Swedish as spoken further North on the pensinsula. After the conquest the population there was forced to learn Swedish and ended up as speakers of a Swedish dialect. Only the island Bornholm escaped and there people still talk Danish, but with a singsong melody reminiscent of Swedish.
The general effect of the turmoil was therefore to establish a much clearer boundary between Danish and Swedish then there was in the Medieval period. Actually the Kalmar union could have survived (or Denmark could have been completey defeated in 1660 by Karl X Gustav), and then we would in all likelihood just have counted one Nordic language with minor variations in the Nordic countries today. But instead we ended up with clearer demarcationslines than before. Another example: while Occitan still was a vigourous force in Southern France it formed a clear bridge between Catalan and French and also between the dialects of Northern Italy and French. Since the brutal crusades from the North, followed by centuries of administrative oppression people in South now speak French with or without an Occitan accent, and the ancient function of Occitan as a bridge towards the South and East has disappeared. Catalan has drifted towards Castillian, and the Italian dialeccts have also come closer to a standard ultimately based on Tuscan. It seems that dialect continua tend to develop when languages are left to their own devices, whereas languages are born when political forces disrupt the unofficial contacts between neighbours. And with the advent of country-wide massmedia the tendency towards monolitic and sharply divided languages without dialects - one language per country - has become even more pronounced. The losers are minor languages and dialects within these prolitical and media-dictated borders. Edited by Iversen on 25 October 2013 at 12:40pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5344 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 165 of 299 25 October 2013 at 11:43am | IP Logged | |||||
Let me guess. The one giving the lecture had Finnish as his mother tongue? And just to clarify: I did not mean that the Swedish dialects are closer to standard Norwegian than they are to standard Swedish. I meant that they are closer to standard Norwegian than the standard Swedish is - but they still remain clearly a Swedish dialect. If we had spoken about standard Norwegian and Danish only, I would have been more willing to consider them variants of the same language. Both vocabulary and grammar is fairly similar, the main difference lies in the (huge!) difference in pronunciation. Swedish is however another matter. Although it is easier to understand, because of exposure and because the pronunciation is more similar, the vocabulary and grammar is more different. There is a reason why when you see translations on the back of a shampoo bottle, you will often have Finnish (obviously), Swedish, and Norwegian/Danish with just a few words written in both languages. The structure and vocabulary is otherwise extremely similar. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4717 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 166 of 299 25 October 2013 at 11:47am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think the key thing to remember for a learner (!) is that Swedish and Norwegian are
separate languages because you will have to go through the effort of learning them as distinguished and separate entities. If you are looking only to understand passively, then learning either is sufficient to understand the other if you expose yourself to exactly that vocabulary that makes the one Swedish and the other Norwegian (or Danish), and learn their phonological rules. In short, Iversen's comment that if you want to learn Swedish and Norwegian, you should do so separately, is 100% accurate and to the point. What DOES happen though is that because they are so similar, the time you will take and the bonus you will get will mean your workload drastically decreases - they're variations on a theme. If I want to move from playing black metal to death metal, it's not that big a difference. If I'm playing punk and want to move to avant-garde, then it's a bridge. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4263 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 167 of 299 25 October 2013 at 1:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't see the relevance but yes. I didn't try claim anything, I just said that according to experts it makes more sense to think of them as dialects of the same continuum in linguistic studies. Officially they are of course two different languages because they've both been standardized and recognized as such. To lighten the mood, here are a few videos from a series of tv-ads from a company that offers information services via phone. In the ads there's always someone asking a question in very standard Finnish and is unable to comprehend the heavy dialectal response to it and they want to imply that it would just be easier to call "020202" since they speak clear standard Finnish. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQZK-DKmcPI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnpfnYweSTQ Edited by Henkkles on 25 October 2013 at 1:56pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| LaughingChimp Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4709 days ago 346 posts - 594 votes Speaks: Czech* | Message 168 of 299 25 October 2013 at 5:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
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... you don't speak more than one language.
3 persons have voted this message useful |
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