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.
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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, smÃ¥ 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!
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