{"id":41313,"date":"2003-12-28T09:43:00","date_gmt":"2003-12-28T09:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2003\/12\/28\/danish-so-called-pronunciation\/"},"modified":"2003-12-28T09:43:00","modified_gmt":"2003-12-28T09:43:00","slug":"danish-so-called-pronunciation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20031228-00\/?p=41313","title":{"rendered":"Danish so-called &quot;pronunciation&quot;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Of course my real goal in studying German and Swedish is eventually to have all of Denmark surrounded. (After Swedish, the next most likely nearby targets are&nbsp;Norwegian and Dutch.)\nAll I know about Denmark I learned from Swedes. Well, if you don&#8217;t count one Danish co-worker, who moved back to Denmark several years ago. The Swedes tell me, &#8220;The Danes would be so much easier to understand if they would only take the hot potato out of their mouth before they started talking.&#8221; (Two Swedes have told me that Danish sounds &#8220;drunk&#8221;.)\nI thought this was just friendly Scandinavian pick-on-your-neighbor-ism until I actually listened to some Danish closely.\nBelieve it or not, the odd collection of sounds that comes out of their mouths (1)&nbsp;counts as a language, and (2)&nbsp;is comprehensible to other Danes. Listen for yourself: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.speakdanish.dk\/html\/pronunciation_intro.htm\">R&oslash;dgr&oslash;d med fl&oslash;de<\/a>. That &#8220;soft d&#8221; I will never, ever learn to pronounce properly. It appears to requires the use of throat muscles that most people are content to use only for swallowing.\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.geocities.com\/tsca.geo\/dansk\/dkwymowa.html\">This site has a longer sample of Danish speech<\/a>. You thought swallowing a word was just a figure of speech? Check out the pronunciation of Sverigesf&aelig;rgen which sounds to me something like &#8220;Svesf&aelig;n&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Okay, now that I&#8217;ve publically made fun of Danish, my punishment will probably be that I will be called upon to study it seriously at some point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Of course my real goal in studying German and Swedish is eventually to have all of Denmark surrounded. (After Swedish, the next most likely nearby targets are&nbsp;Norwegian and Dutch.) All I know about Denmark I learned from Swedes. Well, if you don&#8217;t count one Danish co-worker, who moved back to Denmark several years ago. The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-41313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Of course my real goal in studying German and Swedish is eventually to have all of Denmark surrounded. (After Swedish, the next most likely nearby targets are&nbsp;Norwegian and Dutch.) All I know about Denmark I learned from Swedes. Well, if you don&#8217;t count one Danish co-worker, who moved back to Denmark several years ago. The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41313\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}