Quote:
Originally Posted by Joel_Cairo 
As someone who works in the Acquisitions division of Harvard Library's Germanic Department, I come across most of the northern European languages on a daily basis. Speaking Norwegian and German fluently, its easy to decipher Danish, Swedish and Dutch, Icelandic is considerably more difficult, but doable. When I get a shipment from Hunagry or Finland, I pretty much just fake it.
That said, dutch is the craziest sounding shit I've ever heard. Dutch seems to have a pronounciation exactly like English's, which I attribute to the long history of back-and-forth between Holland and England. When you see a Dutch word, you can phontecially figure it out and you'll be right (they may enunciate differntly, but they pronounce the constituent parts the same.) Dutch seriously sounds to me like a native english speaker making up a germanic language as they go along
That said, dutch is the craziest sounding shit I've ever heard. Dutch seems to have a pronounciation exactly like English's, which I attribute to the long history of back-and-forth between Holland and England. When you see a Dutch word, you can phontecially figure it out and you'll be right (they may enunciate differntly, but they pronounce the constituent parts the same.) Dutch seriously sounds to me like a native english speaker making up a germanic language as they go along
An interesting view of Dutch. It is not a pleasant language but, you are right, it is interesting. It has been charachterized as speaking German with a cold. English leans heavily to the Plattdeutsch/Frisian dialects and 'Yes' instead of 'Ja' appears they tell me. Finnish and Hungarian of course are part of the same langauage family Finno/Ugrian along with Estonian.
