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:
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.
Fortress of Solitude IV 