I do find the links between all three Scandinavian languages and English fascinating (all those invasions)... Two things which I think particularly interesting are that spoken Norwegian is the easiest to guess correctly if you speak English; and that if you just listen to the *sounds* of Swedish, Danish et al., it sounds like English spoken with a northern accent (maybe not to a northerner)...
It's remarkable to experience all of the overlaps, isn't it? This makes me want to listen to more northern English accents! I found at first that the Nordic languages were easier to read than to hear, but some of that was having a bad ear for untangling words as spoken from how they are as written (the equivalent of “gonna” vs ”going to”). Once, when I hardly knew any Swedish at all, I went to see a movie — a biopic on Hannah Arendt — in which the characters spoke in both English and German and the subtitles were in Swedish. I came out dizzily confused, all of those different pronunciations of essentially the same words…
Thank you for this explanation! Very interesting. And isn't that photograph and flower beautiful?
Yes! Amazing plant, so far as I can tell, and agreed, completely beautiful.
I do find the links between all three Scandinavian languages and English fascinating (all those invasions)... Two things which I think particularly interesting are that spoken Norwegian is the easiest to guess correctly if you speak English; and that if you just listen to the *sounds* of Swedish, Danish et al., it sounds like English spoken with a northern accent (maybe not to a northerner)...
It's remarkable to experience all of the overlaps, isn't it? This makes me want to listen to more northern English accents! I found at first that the Nordic languages were easier to read than to hear, but some of that was having a bad ear for untangling words as spoken from how they are as written (the equivalent of “gonna” vs ”going to”). Once, when I hardly knew any Swedish at all, I went to see a movie — a biopic on Hannah Arendt — in which the characters spoke in both English and German and the subtitles were in Swedish. I came out dizzily confused, all of those different pronunciations of essentially the same words…
Love the biopic experience…!