danish so similar to english?
in the movie I've noticed that a lot of words were similar to english and, most of all, the protagonist said a lot of times fu**. how's that, danish doesn't have bad words for its own?
thank you
English is a bastardisation of pretty much all of the northeast of europes language.
German, Danish, Dutch.
Its all in there.
I see. it has also some familiarity with italian, even if I guess it is a lot less remarkable than with northern languages. easy guess that it's because of past latin influence.
Britain (the island which England is the largest part of) was invaded in 1066 by Normans from Normandy in North France, speaking largely an old form of French, who themselves were originally Vikings from Northern Europe who had invaded Normandy a couple of centuries earlier. Hence the large latin part in English, from the Romance language they picked up from living a couple of centuries in Normandy. The British people who were invaded had already suffered invasions by Romans, but, more important linguistically, by Angles, Saxons and Jutes from what is now the Denmark area. The name of the country in various languages; England, Angleterre, Inglaterra; refers to the prevalence of Angles in the population. Thus, a Germanic basis with a heavy injection of old Romance. A later large empire helped pick up a lot of words from other languages all over the world. Which leaves us with, as was alluded to earlier, a bastard language (which is essentially how all languages started) of primarily other older European languages. England is a bastard nation with it's current language/culture coming about primarily due to invasions from elsewhere and then the consolidation and distortion of all those influences by the fortune of then never being successfully invaded for another thousand years.
There is a lot in common between English and Italian, at least in terms of language 'distance'. So much so that several academic studies [Hawkins 1981] have reached the same conclusion by comparing word order, spelling, sounds used, word similarity; that Italian is the 'easiest' language for native English speakers to learn.
BTW I'm English.
Nice history lesson! But it had little to do with the Danish.
shareI was addressing both of lucio7's points which were similarities between English and both Danish *and* Italian.
As for Danish in particular; re-read the part about the Angles.
Cheers.
The word "fvck" is officially in the Danish dictionary. We just adopted it like a lot of English words (burger, car port, etc.). We have our own curse words but some people resort to the English "fvck" or *beep* We don't say it with its original meaning, though, it's just a curse word.
shareI watched the trilogy recently and understood a few words, even though I'm from Poland. Seems that Dutch has a bit in common with Polish as well.
share"I watched the trilogy recently and understood a few words, even though I'm from Poland. Seems that Dutch has a bit in common with Polish as well."
They don't speak Dutch in this movie. They speak Danish.
The words you understood might have been Milo and his guys. They speak Yugoslavian in several places.
France let the Norman Vikings from Scandinavia have Normandy in return for them not invading the rest of France, but they adopted the French language and invaded Britain, then Ireland and also France.
share