The Danish thrust

Danish was the first Scandinavian language I ever became interested in, many years ago. Although I can hardly remember when exactly it happened, it did in a time when I didn’t know much about languages in general. My strongest memory from this period is actually the following song, which, although already ‘old’ even then, got stuck in my head:

»Danse i måneskin«

From Danish, I eventually moved to Norwegian circa 2003 (with the very first book from the Routledge Colloquials I’ve ever got!). Again, I still knew so little back then I only had a very vague idea of hearing/reading about Bokmål and Nynorsk, and the Norwegian language conflict as a whole. Nevertheless, I was probably still very attached to Danish even then, so the move was a slow one, and, in all likelihood, it was the Norwegian pronunciation that must’ve won me over.

I don’t really remember how I got interested in Swedish at all; there’s a blog post that mentions it in 20 February 2007, but my personal Swedish thread in the UniLang forum dates back to just a few days later, 24 February 2007; according to what I wrote there, I’d actually already put both Danish and Norwegian away, the Scandinavian bug having bitten me again when I chanced upon my Colloquial Norwegian book. I was very busy studying Serbian seriously around that time, so it was quite a change of direction.

Swedish became a passion, and I was regularly very frustrated with myself for not being able to progress with it. Danish and Norwegian were often still around, though, mostly when I found it interesting to draw comparisons among them.

When I think about it now, though, I do wonder whether this topic should be as complex as I remember, especially because I wasn’t this traumatised by Danish (which would be way far more understandable); moreover, from what I know now, things really aren’t as bad or even as clear-cut as it may sound, and I’ve seen even natives debating over the pronunciation of this or that word.

One point about Swedish that got ingrained in my mind is the impression people were frequently hammering into me how aware I should be of the dangers of spelling pronunciation. I’ve mentioned this a couple of times when writing about Faroese – the impression Swedish has left on me is almost paranoid in nature, and I can remember looking up every single word that came my way in the (few) pronunciation references I had then, to make sure they weren’t pronounced in ways the spelling would deceive me.

However, as someone free from traumas caused by Danish, it was a particular point in its phonology that brought me to write this post, and the title is a giveaway.

Reading about Faroese inevitably means reading about Danish here and there, for many reasons, and something Danish I returned to today was the stød! And I’m completely surprised by how I’m still totally deaf to it, just as I was over twenty years ago. As much as I read about it or no matter how many videos I watch about it, it remains an abstraction, a theoretical construct I cannot anchor in real life at all.

The Faroese Chimera

Faroese, together with Icelandic and some west Norwegian dialects, descends from Old West Norse. While the Icelandic written norm is very old, and its speakers have pretty much been monolingual from the beginning, Danish was the official language of the Faroe Islands for much of their history, and its speakers didn’t even really have a written norm until at least the 19th century.

The Faroese standard orthography as it exists today is the fruit of the work of Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb (1819–1909), who created the basis of the system in 1849. Faroese has got a number of dialects, but no standard spoken language, a situation that exists now as it did back then, which led Hammershaimb to devise an etymological orthography stemming from the language’s Norse origins, borrowing many elements from the Icelandic system for such a goal, but not basing himself on any particular Faroese dialect per se.

Because of its origins, therefore, Faroese orthography is a beast to be tamed by both native and foreign speakers alike, even if on its own terms for each of such groups.

The very first time I’ve ever read anything on Faroese spelling, I remember having the impression of a random, memory-load-based system, with orthography and pronunciation being two different animals you just had to link in your head and move on with it. In that respect, that was, at some point, my impression on all Scandinavian languages to a certain degree, and it’s only after all these years that I can say I can at least understand where each of them is coming from; Faroese, however, continued to look like a chimera.

As I became interested in the language, though, I couldn’t escape facing up to such a monster from the start. Just like I’d done to Scottish Gaelic once, I chose to turn to trying to build spelling patterns and drilling them into my head in a very mechanical fashion. Is that the best way to deal with it? I doubt it, but I couldn’t really think of any other way of doing it, and I definitely don’t trust my listening skills at all in order to try and match sound to letters using my ears alone.

Because of that, my first days (and weeks) of handling Faroese were like putting puzzles together. If I had the word maður ‘man’, for instance, my mind would parse it letter by letter:

  • m- = initial, so straightforward [m];
  • -a- = stressed; long, because -ð- is silent, so [ɛaː];
  • -ð- = silent, but this creates a hiatus that requires a glide to undo; between -a- and -u-, that requires [v];
  • -u- = unstressed, therefore short, so [ʊ];
  • -r- = final, so [ɹ].

Hence maður = [ˈmɛaːvʊɹ].

Needless to say, this is very, very tedious, and requires a lot of flipping back and forth my resources. To make things even more complicated, I soon found out the way Faroese is phonetically transcribed is anything but straightforward and standardised; on the contrary, I’ve been pretty met all sorts of systems and have been sieving them in a way that makes sense to me, amalgamating them in a system of my own that is nevertheless still very subjective, idiosyncratic and idealised. This topic alone would require its very own post, and I didn’t even take dialectal variations into consideration here.

However, I’ve been so excited with Faroese from the start that even such a process hasn’t put me off, and I eventually got to learn a lot from it, so that nowadays there are only certain details that I find myself looking up in the end, having internalised many, if not most, of the features already.

References:

Icelandic to the rescue

It’s a bit curious how much Icelandic I’ve been ‘learning’ in the process of studying Faroese, basically because I’ve been reading a lot about how to study Icelandic in order to try and optimise how to learn Faroese.

A good instance is the verbal system. I’d already read a lot about it, but it wasn’t until I found a website breaking down the Icelandic verb into its categories and subcategories that I actually started to see the parallels in Faroese and make the mental associations in my head. The information was already there in plain sight, but I needed to see a more didactic breakdown of the system in order to establish the links in my head.

An Introduction to Modern Faroese1, for instance, divides weak verbs into four classes, numbered 1 to 4, which pretty much correspond to the categories that Icelandic Made Easi(er) (www.icelandicmadeeasier.com) refers to as -a verbs, -i verbs, ey-j-ur verbs and hybrid verbs. It was by reading about the Icelandic defining features of each category that I got to digest the information about the Faroese parallels.

The very examples aren’t necessarily the same, of course (for all I know, gera is an -i verb in Icelandic, but in Faroese it’s equivalent to a hybrid verb instead), so it’s important to keep my eyes open for such things. The theoretical background, however, has been invaluable.

1 Lockwood, W. B. (2002). An Introduction to Modern Faroese. Føroya Skúlabókagrunnur.

Sewing it all together

‘a black dog’SingularPlural
Nein svartur hundursvartir hundar
Aein svartan hundsvartar hundar
Deinum svørtum hundisvørtum hundum
‘the black dog’SingularPlural
Ntann svarti hundurinteir svørtu hundarnir
Atann svarta hundinteir svørtu hundarnar
Dtí svarta hundinumteimum svørtu hundunum
‘a white cat’SingularPlural
Nein hvít kettahvítar kettur
Aeina hvíta kettuhvítar kettur
Deinari hvítari kettuhvítum kettum
‘the white cat’SingularPlural
Ntann hvíta kettantær hvítu ketturnar
Ata hvítu kettunatær hvítu ketturnar
Dteirri hvítu kettuniteimum hvítu kettunum
‘a blue house’SingularPlural
Neitt blátt húsblá hús
Aeitt blátt húsblá hús
Deinum bláum húsibláum húsum
‘the blue house’SingularPlural
Ntað bláa húsiðtey bláu húsini
Atað bláa húsiðtey bláu húsini
Dtí bláa húsinumteimum bláu húsunum

Á oyggjunum

Faroese has been a delightful journey I didn’t (and couldn’t possibly) anticipate. I haven’t felt this excited and curious about a language in a long, long time, which makes it all the more disappointing that real life just totally gets in the way big time these days and I can’t dedicate any more of my free time to Faroese.

I’ve grown a lot more used to the orthography and how to guess the pronunciation based on it (which is curiously something that has always kept me on my toes in Swedish, although I’d initially thought Faroese would be worse in that regard). I still check my charts back and forth quite often, and many details of the phonology itself are still kind of hazy (although the more I read about dialectal variations, the more it feels like I know what’s going on, but it’s just that it varies so much across the islands that having a standard to stick to wouldn’t be so bad in the end), but it doesn’t look exotic and puzzling any more (I no longer look at ð’s, for instance, expecting them to actually be there, so to speak).

I’m still attending Grammar 101, so there’s pretty much nothing too difficult or unexpected going on, at least as of yet. One point that comes to mind is that, although, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve studied bits of Icelandic in the past, it took me a while to realise that Faroese verbs have got a single form for the plural, while that’s not the case in Icelandic:

FaroeseIcelandic
at skrivaað skrifa
eg skriviég skrifa
tú skrivarþú skrifar
hann, hon, tað skrivarhann, hún, það skrifar
vit skrivavið skrifum
tit skrivaþið skrifið
teir, tær, tey skrivaþeir, þær, þau skrifa
‘to write’, Present Indicative

Another week is just about to begin, let’s see how much time I’ll still keep finding for Faroese.

To the isles

Icelandic caught my interest in the past, once or twice, yet the spark didn’t really lead anywhere. There’s pretty much all in it that usually draws my attention: genders, declension, conjugation, a very interesting orthography (and I remember finding its relationship with the phonology of the language really puzzling at first); yet, it didn’t catch my attention the way even I believe it was supposed to. It just never has.

And then, here I am, suddenly fascinated by Faroese, with its apparently much more complicated relationship between orthography and phonology (which I still find very puzzling, although I seem to be getting the theoretical gist of it), its moribund genitive, slightly more speakers than pretty much the population of my own town, and far, by far fewer resources and reference materials!

No idea where I’m heading with this, but it’s all fun and games after all. Eg læri føroyskt nú, men eg sakni svenskt.

O mnie

Cześć!

Mam na imię Marcel. Jestem z Brazylii i mieszkam w miasteczku w stanie Sao Paulo. Jestem zamężny żonaty i mam dwóch synów.

Mam też pięć kotów, które się nazywają Pandora, Adis Abeba, Otto, Bastet i Bakhita.

Mój język ojczysty to portugalski, a ja także mówię angielski po angielsku, którego się uczę odkąd miałem skończyłem dziewięć lat. Lubię uczyć się języków obcych, ale obecnie nie mam na to niestety czasu. Języki, którymi aktualny aktualnie się interesuję, są polski, niemiecki, bułgarski, walijski i japoński.

I tak oto jest powstał mój pierwszy „artykuł” po polsku!

Journaly

Tachygraphia

A few weeks ago, I decided it’s high time I learnt shorthand. When I was a child, I had typewriting classes, and I got a book on typewriting that also had shorthand lessons; I’d no idea what shorthand was before, but I got fascinated by it. Yet, it felt really hard to acquire it back then and, although I’ve returned to that book time and again, I never got myself to get past the very basics.

For some reason this year, though, I decided I wanted to give it a serious try yet again. I’d gathered more information and bookmarked a few websites on it in the past, so, although I’ve still got my childhood book about shorthand, I had other places I could start from and walk myself through this time around.

The system I’m studying for Portuguese is called Leite Alves, which happens to be the same one taught in my book. It was developed by Dr Oscar Leite Alves specifically for Portuguese and first presented in 1929. The system is mostly phonemic, having distinct consonantal and vocalic signs, all derived from geometry; it also distinguishes between light and heavy lines, which was probably the point I had most problems adjusting to as a child learning it on my own.

There are many other systems that can be used for Portuguese, both designed by native speakers and adapted from foreign systems. All the data I’ve had access to present Leite Alves as the most common system in Brazil, with Martí, Taylor and Maron given as other popular alternatives.

Being so interested in foreign scripts as I am, though, I couldn’t help reading a lot about shorthand methods used in other languages, especially Pitman, Gregg and Teeline for English, and Gabelsberger and Deutsche Einheitskurzschrift (DEK) for German.

I wanted to give studying a system for English a try as well, but I didn’t know how to pick one; although I think Gregg looks extremely beautiful, it’s mostly restricted to the USA (and perhaps Canada), and so, being as systematically stubborn as I am, I turned myself mostly to Pitman and Teeline, which are the most commonly used methods in the UK.

Pitman is a traditional heavy-line geometric system based on phonetics, which would fall more in line with my studying Leite Alves (although there are many, many differences in their design overall, such as how Pitman indicates vowels using dots and dashes in relative positions); Teeline, on the other hand, is a contemporary semi-script spelling-based system, which I don’t really find anywhere as appealing. Yet, as I happened to find some nice materials about Teeline, it’s Teeline I’ve been studying for the past couple of days after all.

I don’t necessarily aim for speed in Portuguese. My job is hugely secretarial in nature, and my typewriting skills have always been a plus, having transferred nicely from typewriters to computer keyboards, so shorthand may have its place in my daily life; however, it’s not a requirement per se, so that, for now, I’m enjoying the road (but I wouldn’t pass a job opportunity based on it if I excelled at it – the pay is often very good in the civil service for such a position).

When it comes to English, though, it’s all but a fancy intellectual hobby anyway, so Teeline or Pitman – or even Gregg – is something I could move around at will indefinitely after all, so let’s see how much dabbling awaits.