Posted on 11/29/2012 2:59:29 PM PST by Renfield
"Have you considered how easy it is for us Norwegians to learn English?" asks Jan Terje Faarlund, professor of linguistics at the University of Oslo. "Obviously there are many English words that resemble ours. But there is something more: its fundamental structure is strikingly similar to Norwegian. We avoid many of the usual mistakes because the grammar is more or less the same.
Faarlund and his colleague Joseph Emmonds, visiting professor from Palacký University in the Czech Republic, now believe they can prove that English is in reality a Scandinavian language, in other words it belongs to the Northern Germanic language group, just like Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic and Faroese. This is totally new and breaks with what other language researchers and the rest of the world believe, namely that English descends directly from Old English. Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, is a West Germanic language, which the Angles and Saxons brought with them from Northern Germany and Southern Jylland when they settled in the British Isles in the fifth century....
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
>>> passed with a good grade but have often wondered if it would have been easier learning if I had a German speaking English prof.<<<
I have my doubts that it would have mattered.
http://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html
Yes grammar and conjugation of verbs is very simple but they speak with a “kartoffler i halsen” (potato in throat). Once you begin to hear it is relatively easy to understand but speaking is another matter. I had only been there for three months when all of a sudden I started to understand. I was doing conjugation flashcards everyday and memorizing paragraphs attempting the perfect accent. Suddenly it happened.
I listen to a Danish Jazz station every day to hear the language regularly. Went there for Christmas four years ago.
Ah, so Norwegian is sort of the entry point and the hub. Sounds like good advice.
Yep, that’s it.
Cut out all of the extra vowels and send them to the vowel deficient Eastern Europeans.
Yup, and the first speaker of said language will be claimed as a homo by the left.
Is it part of a song by any chance? If so, please post it.
Oh, they’ll surrender eventually.
As Norway and the Danes once ruled England this is possible—Remember King Canute?
To be fair, early English bears little resemblance to modern day English.
And now a few words from Sven:
“Fleur der husker der, fleur der husker der, Fleurder der berger der bor!”
That was Sven, the Swedish cook, and his thoughts on the matter!
And to think that people actually get paid to research stuff that has no real relevance to today.
LOL..Fielding Melish Obama.
BMFL
I studied Danish briefly in college (an extracurricular class taught by a Danish exchange student) in preparation for a trip to Denmark, and I didn’t find the pronunciation difficult at all. The structure of Danish is similar to English, and I picked up basic Danish quickly. However, there aren’t as many Danish cognates of English words as you might imagine. Studying Danish serves to remind the student just how much of our lexicon descends to us from Latin, via French.
I have no idea if it’s in a song; it’s a SpongeBob Thing.
German word order very different from English is. :-)
And don’t even let me get started on my rant about assigning a gender to nouns. Too late...here goes: Masculine, Feminine, Neuter. What is this European obsession with sex anyway? The French and Germans can’t even agree upon the gender of the moon [la lune vs. der Mond). Who assigned such rules anyway? No wonder they have so many wars. /rant
Heh. When I was a young-skull-full-of-mush learning French in Quebec, the noun genders were a real Pelosi. It was interesting to find that my French-Canadian buddies didn't know the genders, either.
When I'd ask them, say, if the word for car [char] was masculine or feminine, they'd have to say it out loud with the masculine article (un) and then the feminine (une). Finally, they would pronounce that, indeed, it was masculine -- un char sounded right.
I provided them with no end of hilarity as I struggled. I remembered that they use the English word for jacket and, one day, pronounced that I'd forgotten ma jaquette. Well, that resulted in howls of laughter because ma jaquette is my nightgown -- mon jacket is my jacket.
Eventually, many of them came down here to visit and to practice their English. I got them back in spades. English is tougher -- glad I was born into it.
Hebrew? Really? “Oy Vey!”
Seriously - care to provide any substantiation for your claim that Hebrew contributed much if anything at all to the English language outside of a few local and isolated colloquialisms brought to the language by relatively recent immigrants?
My Scandinavian ancestors (Norwegian Vikings) influenced the English language and culture and the rule of law more than you know. The Hebrews, meh, not so much.
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