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Any Danish speakers here? It should be even closer to English as that's where the Angles and Saxons are from.

vidarh 13y ago
Look at my lists of Norwegian translations. Most either apply directly for Danish too, or with minor changes ("Bokmål", the written language used by a majority of Norwegians, was largely derived from Danish, and hasn't diverged all that much)
eitland 13y ago
I'm pretty sure there are, at least I think I see Norwegians all the time : ) When you know Norwegian or Danish you can see a lot of similarities. The explanation I got was that around year 1000 Norway/Denmark was pretty much a naval superpower.
- vidarh 13y ago
  It's actually more recent. From the mid 1300's the Norwegian and Danish monarchy merged through marriage, and Denmark became by far the dominant party in the union. (Schelswig-Holsten was also for some time part of The union lasted until 1814, when Denmark (and by extension Norway) had supported Napoleon, and Sweden had joined the other side. Sweden got Norway as a "price". But during that period, a lot of people had started preparing for an attempt at Norwegian independence. And while we entered into a looser union with Sweden, there was a long ongoing debate about creating a new, formalised Norwegian language. We ended up with two, but one of them - bokmål - was basically Danish + Norwegian pronunciation + various spelling reforms, as this was effectively what was spoken amongst the upper classes in the cities, and this (with further spelling reforms) is the dominant written language today (the other was based on spoken dialects, and is further from Danish but not that much) . So we've "only" had about 200 years for the languages to diverge again.
jmadsen 13y ago
true - many people assume small, common words come from German, until they see how much closer the (especially spoken) Danish words are. Place with the google translate pronunciation button for some simple sentences for a while - you'll be surprised how much you understand
felxh 13y ago
The fact that the Angles and Saxons were from an area that is currently Denmark means nothing. Territories, country borders and the languages and cultures occupying them have changed significantly in the north of Europe after the collapse of the roman empire to the present day. The angles and saxons spoke a western germanic language, whereas modern danish is a northern germanic language. EDIT: as a side node: Frisian is the language commonly regarded as being closest to English
ochrist 13y ago
Yes, right here. And actually English is really a Scandinavian language (Northern Germanic), and not Western Germanic as many believe: http://sciencenordic.com/english-scandinavian-language http://sciencenordic.com/english-scandinavian-language
abrahamsen 13y ago
Yes, Danish seems to be in between German and English, except for the first example. die/der/das -> [see below] -> the drei -> tre -> three Donner -> torden -> thunder Ding -> ting -> thing daher -> derfor -> therefore du -> du -> thou I have no idea what happened to the definite article in Danish though: ein Haus -> et hus -> a house das Haus -> huset -> the house Aside: The Danish capitalization rules used to mirror the German rules until after WWII, where we switched to the Swedish rules.

Look at my lists of Norwegian translations. Most either apply directly for Danish too, or with minor changes ("Bokmål", the written language used by a majority of Norwegians, was largely derived from Danish, and hasn't diverged all that much)

eitland 13y ago

I'm pretty sure there are, at least I think I see Norwegians all the time : ) When you know Norwegian or Danish you can see a lot of similarities. The explanation I got was that around year 1000 Norway/Denmark was pretty much a naval superpower.

vidarh 13y ago
It's actually more recent. From the mid 1300's the Norwegian and Danish monarchy merged through marriage, and Denmark became by far the dominant party in the union. (Schelswig-Holsten was also for some time part of The union lasted until 1814, when Denmark (and by extension Norway) had supported Napoleon, and Sweden had joined the other side. Sweden got Norway as a "price". But during that period, a lot of people had started preparing for an attempt at Norwegian independence. And while we entered into a looser union with Sweden, there was a long ongoing debate about creating a new, formalised Norwegian language. We ended up with two, but one of them - bokmål - was basically Danish + Norwegian pronunciation + various spelling reforms, as this was effectively what was spoken amongst the upper classes in the cities, and this (with further spelling reforms) is the dominant written language today (the other was based on spoken dialects, and is further from Danish but not that much) . So we've "only" had about 200 years for the languages to diverge again.

jmadsen 13y ago

true - many people assume small, common words come from German, until they see how much closer the (especially spoken) Danish words are. Place with the google translate pronunciation button for some simple sentences for a while - you'll be surprised how much you understand

felxh 13y ago

The fact that the Angles and Saxons were from an area that is currently Denmark means nothing. Territories, country borders and the languages and cultures occupying them have changed significantly in the north of Europe after the collapse of the roman empire to the present day. The angles and saxons spoke a western germanic language, whereas modern danish is a northern germanic language. EDIT: as a side node: Frisian is the language commonly regarded as being closest to English

ochrist 13y ago

Yes, right here. And actually English is really a Scandinavian language (Northern Germanic), and not Western Germanic as many believe: http://sciencenordic.com/english-scandinavian-language http://sciencenordic.com/english-scandinavian-language

abrahamsen 13y ago

Yes, Danish seems to be in between German and English, except for the first example. die/der/das -> [see below] -> the drei -> tre -> three Donner -> torden -> thunder Ding -> ting -> thing daher -> derfor -> therefore du -> du -> thou I have no idea what happened to the definite article in Danish though: ein Haus -> et hus -> a house das Haus -> huset -> the house Aside: The Danish capitalization rules used to mirror the German rules until after WWII, where we switched to the Swedish rules.