Skip to content
Archive of posts filed under the Language category.

Prøvesten – from a word to an island.

Posted by Bart Westgeest on 20 December 2009, 4:48 pm

Map of the main attack by the swedish army on Copenhagen on the 11th of February 1659. Source: Wikipedia

When listening to the danish language program Sproghjørnet I heard a discussion about the word “Prøvesten”. It was said that besides being a stone to test whether a material was what it seemed to be, for example gold,  it had also been the name of a ship. This ship, together with other ships, was after ending its duties, sunk to form the basis of a little Island called Prøvesten on which was build a fortress to defend Copenhagen.

I went looking for this little island on the internet and saw that it is now part of Copenhagen harbour, well connected to the mainland. I also found this map showing the little island of Prøvesten but also the rather immense defense works of Copenhagen. I had hardly realized that those remains of the defense system still exist and that Copenhagen had once been fortress like that. I came to think of this post of Cristhoper’s picture blog with the text explaining about an amazing long siege of Copenhagen.

It struck me that there is a lot of focus in Denmark on the prehistoric times of the Vikings and before. An enormously rich and unique period of Danish history, but there have been other times, much closer to ours, that have been of major importance to the present state of this part of the world.

I know a tiny little bit about Swedish supremacy and Danish invasions and interests in the south of Sweden and the Danish interests in the north of Germany. There must have been many wars and events, but it is not a very common thing to discuss this period in the media or elsewhere.

Was Copenhagen indeed such a strong fort as the remains of its walls suggest?

Being a Dutchman I remember a story from Danish history books about the Dutch “helping” to free Copenhagen from a siege by the Swedes, and I wondered if it was a part of the same story.

It is quite amazing to notice that finding information about this period is not that simple. The internet is great, fantastic, but sometimes it is clear that it is also still young and under development.

Luckily there is Wikipedia telling about the long siege of the apparently well defended and walled city of Copenhagen in 1658 to 1660.  And indeed it is confirmed here that the intervention of the Dutch fleet was a major help that probably saved the town. Wikipedia states (without naming a source) that Dutch marines even helped on land, o.a. in this fragment:

The moats and the beaches had been kept free of ice, and now the ice free zones were widened to 44 feet with the help from 600 Dutch marines. The ice was thick, and the work was done in heavy snowfall from 4 o’clock in the afternoon till evening on the 10 February.

After reading a little bit more about this Swedish attack on Denmark I now understand that Denmark was on the verge of being wiped out completely. A major event as big as the defeat against Germany in 1864. The latter being more often mentioned and commemorated, probably also because it is not that long ago (as a result of this war parts of south Denmark became danish again as late as in 1920). But where as the teaching of history and the culture and identity of the Dutch is mainly based upon the 17th century, it is in Denmark an eventful period that seems to be outside the main interest or perhaps overshadowed by other periods.

Filed under History, Language.
1 Comment

The Danish Language

Posted by Bart Westgeest on 3 April 2009, 1:09 pm

imgp0954200Danish is a Germanic language and part of the Scandinavian Languages. It is spoken by appr. 6 million people of which 5,5 million live in Denmark itself.  Its predecessor is Proto-Germanic, the language spoken in North and West Europe long before this part of the world came in contact with the (Roman) habit of writing.

It is slightly different from Swedish and Norwegian, but not that much, so it is generally considered possible for people from Sweden, Norway and Denmark to understand each others language. The other main Germanic languages, German, English and Dutch are less closely related and can not be understood by a Dane without some knowledge of them. (Most Danes speak excellent English and some German due to teaching at school). Icelandic and Faroese are two other closely related languages that have their own history and that can’t be well understood by a modern-danish speaking person.

The main characteristic of Danish  is that many sounds and words are very similar to each other and are pronounced in short bursts of sound. This makes it not easy to recognize and pronounce words for beginning students. Sentences like: “Der er en ø i åen” (There is an island in the river) is more or less pronounced like “De e n ø i o’n”, and when the soccerclubs from Aalburg and Odense meet (AaB and OB), it is hard for a foreigner to explain a Dane which of the two is winning as the foreigner will probably hardly hear the difference in name.

Another difficult letter is the so called “soft d”. This is a “d”, usually at the end of a word, pronounced in a typical Danish way that might make it sound as a sort of “L”, although it definitely is not an “L”.This letter is very hard to pronounce correct for non-native speakers.

Grammar is not too difficult, although certainly not without exceptions and rules that need to be memorized and studied. One striking feature is that new words can easily be made by combing other words, like “misundelsesskat” (“jalousitaxes”) or “privatøkonomien” (“the private economies”).

More facts about the Danish language can be found at this factsheet of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

If you want to listen to some Danish this site from the Danish national broadcasting corporation has a list of all its internetradio stations.

Related Article:

German influence on the Danish Language.

Filed under Language.
Comment

The history of the Danish dictionary

Posted by Daniela Lot on 19 January 2009, 7:06 pm

In Denmark, the dictionaries are named after their publishers. There is for example “the red dictionary” (Gyldendals Røde Ordbøger), published by Gyldendal, and Politikens Danskordbog, published by Politiken, both of them edited by a team of editors.

In Brazil, dictionaries are named after their lexicographers. For example, “Aurélio” is named after Aurélio Buarque de Holanda Ferreira (1910-1989), who was also a philosopher and essayist, and “Houaiss”, after Antônio Houaiss (1915-1999), a writer and philologist, who also elaborated two encyclopedias.

“Grundlagt af Hermann Vinterberg“, says the first page of the Gyldendals Røde Ordbøger. Grundlagt is the Danish word for “founded/established”. But who was Hermann Vinterberg? In the same page it says “af Jens Axelsen“, what means “by Jens Axelsen”. Again, who was Jens Axelsen? A search on internet and in Århus public library catalog did not bring any clue about who they were, and neither about the history of the Danish dictionary.

The answers to these questions are yet to be found by me.

Filed under Language.
Comment

The Poet Inger Christensen

Posted by Bart Westgeest on 17 January 2009, 7:01 pm

Poetry is a hard nut to crack for a non-native speaker, but it can nevertheless help to understand and appreciate the language it is written in.
What to read and by who is a difficult question but the sad occasion of someone’s death is often a reason to have another look at somebodies work.

After the death of Inger Christensen on January 2nd there have been a number of articles in the newspapers and if this is an indication for her importance for Danish Literature than it is certainly worth to take a look at:

A biography of Inger Christensen

An Article in The New York Times

Article about a wall in Copenhagen with part of a poem by Inger Christensen.

A list of her works.

After her death this sound fragment of 1964 was rediscovered in the archives of the national Danish radio station DR and publish on YouTube:

Inger Christensen singing from her bundle “Lys” (1962):

Filed under Language.
Comment

German influence on the Danish Language.

Posted by Bart Westgeest on 10 January 2009, 6:56 pm

There was a question in the highly debated citizenship test of December 2008 about which language has influenced the Danish language most: Latin, Finnish or German. At first I went too far back into history in my mind and I was wondering what time period they were thinking about. Was it about Low German, High German or maybe the language that formed the basis of modern Danish? I took it that it might just as well have been Latin as I assumed that the clerical language was Latin for a number of centuries.  The answer is German however. This is what the Factsheet Denmark of the Danish Foreign Ministry says:

Danish was subject to the strongest external influence in the period 1200-1500. The North German language of the Hanseatic towns was able to spread because the area came to dominate the entire Nordic and Baltic area commercially and economically for several hundred years. There were large German-speaking population groups in the major Danish towns and Low German was not as different from the Nordic languages of that time as German is from contemporary Scandinavian languages. Therefore German could more easily influence Nordic. It is obvious from the vocabulary. The influence was partly direct, partly indirect, as most of the Romance and Classical loans have also been mediated through this language.

Many of the words are related to trade, crafts and urban life, but quite a few enter the core vocabulary, for instance angst, lykke, magt, blive, straks, jo (fear, happiness, power, become, immediately, after all). Danish has adopted at least 1,500 words from Middle Low German alone. After the Reformation, the import of loanwords from the south continued. German remained the main supplier, but High German, Luther‘s German, increasingly replaced Low German as the source of i nfluence. Easily recognisable are words with the prefixes ge- and er such as gespenst, gemen, erfare, erhverve (ghost, vile, learn, obtain). Within crafts and trade, the flow of loanwords continued and numerous ordinary words with no particular connection with a specific sphere were added: billig, slyngel, flot, pludselig, munter, etc (cheap, villain, smart, sudden, jolly). As in Germany, most designations of occupation at the new university in Copenhagen were Latin: student, professor, magister. Maritime terms were Low German or Dutch, for instance matros, pynt, dæk, fartøj, etc (able seaman, point, deck, vessel).

Update: TV 2 Nyheder reports that there can be doubt about the answer of this question as Latin had a significant influence and it is hard to measure which of the two had the biggest influence.

Filed under Language.
1 Comment