DANISH LANGUAGE - FALL 1991

When my family and I participated in Denmark's International Studies program (DIS) in Denmark in the fall of 1991, my wife and I attended a Danish language course. A description of our experiences on that trip are in the Denmark.1991 journal. What I learned about the Danish language is described below.

I found it interesting to compare Danish with English, in light of principles of language change that I had learned by pairing my Social Psychology course many times with a Linguistics course at Whittier College. Pairing courses means that the instructors attend each other's course to point out connections between them.

Danish and English are both Germanic languages, so many words were originally the same. But Danish didn't go through the same systematic vowel shift that English did (although it has made other vowel changes). So the Danish vowels are closer to vowels in other European languages, such as Spanish, than English vowels are. For example, A is pronounced like A in AH instead of like A in ATE, and I is pronounced like EE instead of EYE.

On the other hand, Danish has shifted consonants more than English has. In particular, many unvoiced consonants in English have become voiced consonants in Danish, when they are in the medial or final position. Thus k becomes g, p becomes b, and t becomes d in Danish spelling. For example, like=lige, take=tage, cake=kage, maker=mager. The p in Copenhagen becomes b in Ko/benhagen. And "what" (which used to be hwat) becomes "hvad."

Interestingly, shifts in the consonants have continued in Danish pronunciation after Danish spelling was codified. So words still spelled with medial or final k are pronounced like g. For example, "ikke" (similar to German "nicht," which means "not") is pronouced "igge". But words spelled with g are usually pronounced like y or are swallowed -- so "kage" is pronounced like "kay" (one vowell sound) and "morgen" is pronounced like "morn". And words spelled with a medial or final d are pronounced something like l -- so "hvad" is pronounced "val" and "mad" is pronounced "mal."

Thus one sequence is k/g/y as in English "cake," Danish spelling "kage," and Danish pronunciation "kay." Another sequence is t/d/l as in English "what," Danish spelling "hvad," and Danish pronunciation "val." Usually these sequences start with an English word (like cake/kage/kay), but sometimes they end up with a word that sounds like an English word even though it is spelled differently. For example, the Danish word spelled "mad" is pronounced "mal" and means "meal" or food in English (e.g., "aftensmal" means evening meal). Another example is the Danish word "ny" which is pronounced the way French would pronounce "neu" and which means "new" in English.

Knowing these linguistic principals helps me to pronounce Danish words since the changes make sense to me (although there are some exceptions, of course). And these principles also help me to guess the meaning of Danish words by shifting backwards (t for d, k for g, p for b). For example, I saw a sign that said "Bageri" and correctly guessed that it was a bakery, and saw "Uhrmager" and correctly guessed "clockmaker."

But sometimes you can be mistaken looking for cognates, because the Danes have used some of the cognates differently than we! For example, "uhr" (which means hour in German) means clock in Danish, while "klokken" means "o'clock" (thus "klokken 6" means "6 o'clock"). And "time" means "hour" (so "1 time" means "1 hour"). "Tid" pronounced "till" means "time" in the sense of "1 time" or "2 times"; while the word spelled "til" means "to" in the sense of I'm going to Copenhagen. So I've learned to check the cognates in the dictionary to make sure they haven't shifted in meaning as well as in pronunciation!