DANISH VOCABULARY (COMMENT). Molly commented as well about the few Danish words she knows. I also know only a few even though my mother was fluent in Danish. My mother was told by a Dane when she was in her seventies that she spoke well, but with a child’s vocabulary. The one time I was in Denmark, some Danes I met were amused that the few Danish words I knew would have been spoken to a child (my spelling for the following words): “shushkit”, meaning “impossibly messy”; “lille soldaten”, meaning, I think, “little soldiers” and used to refer to very small pancakes; and “fefanen”, which my mother used to say meant “the devil”, but which created more of a commotion when I used it than using “the devil” does in English.
Categories
Archives
Recent Comments
- “A COMFORT BLANKET FOR THE SMUG”? (1)
- Nick: Further informing my perspective was that in the writings of classical Romans the middle-aged authors opined...
- ARE PEOPLE LESS VIOLENT? (COMMENT). (2)
- Dick Weisfelder: My prior comment was just in the context of sports. Whether or not from Pinker, I have seen the...
- erik: It seems doubtful that human nature has changed. The most likely explanation would be that modern culture gives...
- HOW BANKS PREPARED FOR A U.S. DEFAULT. (2)
- GREECE’S ADVANTAGE IN THE CHICKEN GAME. (2)
- Nick: That makes sense. It reminds me of the stories Pater Familias would tell me about how in Boston the person with...
- Dick Weisfelder: Greece seems to me to be playing a game that Karl Deutsch called “underdog.” While one...
- FOOTBALL PLAYERS DELIBERATELY CAUSING CONCUSSIONS? (3)
- Nick: It was my understanding that boxing gloves were to protect the puncher’s hands and not the...
- Dick Weisfelder: Remember the Roman arenas? Bare knuckled boxing? Such injuries were taken as natural and accepted in...
- Mary Jane Schaefer: This isn’t about football. Or even sportsmanship. Well, it is about sportsmanship. But what...
- A 25 % CHANCE OF A EURO DEFAULT? (1)
- Nick: The fact that this has gone on for so long is pretty perplexing. The Economist is referring back to articles it...
- DECIDING WHAT KIND OF PATIENT YOU ARE. (1)
- Dick Weisfelder: One can be very open to new technology, but also risk averse. The recent debates about how to...
- “A COMFORT BLANKET FOR THE SMUG”? (1)
Meta
It’s not as if it’s easy to come by an education in any sort of Danish in this country. Emory teaches dozens of languages, including Swahili and Sanskrit, but doesn’t offer any sort of Northern European language – Swedish, Dutch, Danish, Flemish, etc.
Perhaps this is a product of how well those nations teach English to their citizens.
A very good point, Nick. (And wow, I didn’t know Emory taught so many languages! I think CMU offered only French, Spanish, Italian, German, Japanese, and Chinese. Oh and no Latin or Greek.) I wonder if the Northern European languages have fallen out of favor for political reasons as well… though what those reasons might be, I can only guess.
The words you mentioned are spelled sjusket, små soldater (lille soldat = little soldier), and fy for fanden (fyfanden is Swedish, but you can say it in Danish as well). They’re not pronounced the way you spelled them either.
sjusket = shoosketh or shoosket
små soldater = smoh soul-day-tah
fy for fanden = fü (y-sound doesn’t exist in English which is why I’ve replaced it with a German ü which you might be familiar with) for fann
fy for fanden doesn’t mean anything, but you use it where you’d otherwise use “ew!” or “gross!”. Fanden is one word for The devil.
Chris had a Swedish friend living in the US (unfortunately deceased) who saw “fy fan” (the devil) as the ultimate horrible swear word, even though it sounds so insipid in English. It would really set her off!
Pingback: Pater Familias » WORDS FROM CHILDHOOD--MORGENGNAVEN (COMMENT).