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English - a Scandinavian language? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6363 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 25 of 28 05 December 2012 at 7:06am | IP Logged | ||
I know some Swedish dialects do, but I'm not sure which ones. Like I said, I'm from the eastern fringe of Värmland and we don't have it. That said, even standard Swedish does (or at least used to) differentiate between sexus and genus. So there are only two genders, neutrum and utrum, but some grammatical differences are based on sexus, which is the actual sex of the person or animal, and only applies to living things. So we say "Den gamle mannen" and "Den gamla kvinnan", but that's not a genus difference, but a sexus one. This difference is disappearing, however, with more and more people using the feminine ending for everything. "Den gamla mannen" is not considered incorrect anymore. (Sorry to bring the thread off topic, but this is interesting stuff!) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5234 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 26 of 28 05 December 2012 at 10:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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What about non-living objects? Would you use "den gamle" or "den gamla"? And with neuter nouns, "det gamle" or
"det gamla"? Maybe we should start a separate thread? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6690 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 27 of 28 05 December 2012 at 11:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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Only -a for non-living objects, but personally, I only use -e in spoken Swedish (the Gotlandic accent typically has -e instead of -a, that goes for verbs too, e.g. skriva - [skrive]).
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| limey75 Senior Member United Kingdom germanic.eu/ Joined 4180 days ago 119 posts - 182 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Norwegian, Old English | Message 28 of 28 05 December 2012 at 11:41pm | IP Logged | ||
Well put. Let's face it, English is one big mix of different languages. It's Germanic at heart - including not insubstantial North Germanic elements - but it also features huge quantities of material from Latin, French, and Greek, and smaller amounts from numerous other languages. I think this mongrel nature of English is actually one of its greatest strengths. It is able to absorb some of the best of Western culture - and other cultures besides. Is English a Scandinavian language? Nope. I think we have already established here that it is not. The original article's claim is little more than an entertaining diversion. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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