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You can add this one as an Icelandic dictionary: http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bi ... line.IEOrd. It's pretty good.

I often pronounce "can I" in Norwegian as [cʰjæ] (the formal pronunciation being something like [kʰɑn jæɪ]). Gotta love convergent linguistic evolution.

I... - Always cross q. - Cross 7 after the fact if I find that it looks too much like a 1. - Usually put a serif at the top of 1. - Sometimes put serifs on I ("eye"). - Don't think I ever cross Z/z, although I'm aware of the practice. - Don't distinguish O and 0 at all. - Always use an open 4. - Alw...

Hey Sko, why don't you actually look up the conventional usage of commas in each language that you translate into? Including your own.... :| Maybe I shouldn't be too presumptuous about the use of the comma in Swedish, but in Norwegian the presence of the comma pretty clearly indicates the reading "...

Standard Swedish: Boken, [som] han [hade] läst. book-DEF [that] he [had] read-SUPINE Same structure for all of Northern Germanic. Boka, som han hadde lest. Bogen, der han havde læst. Bókin, sem hann hafði lesið. Bókin, sum hann hevði lisið. You just can't let go of your precious commas, can you? :)...

Agricola Avicula wrote:

Magb wrote:If Setesdalsk has a cousin dialect, it's the one spoken to the north-eastish of Setesdal, in the municipalities of Vinje and Tokke in western Telemark.

Is that the dialect Odd Nordstoga speaks?

That's the one.

1. Phonology What better place to start a description a language or dialect than with the phonology. Fortunately the phonology of Setesdalsk also happens to be probably the most interesting aspect of the dialect. The juiciest stuff is definitely in the vowels, so let's get to it. The IPA symbols I'...

Preamble In this thread I'll be offering my description of a Norwegian dialect called Setesdalsk, because it's a nice dialect and because I like it. I'm not sure how interesting it will be to people who don't already have an interest in Scandinavian dialectology, but hopefully someone will read it....

Doesn't look like anyone's gonna get it. The dialect in question is Setesdalsk . It's probably the only present day Norwegian dialect that might deserve minority language status, since the "true" dialect, which is still spoken by a few people, has limited mutual intelligibility with most other Norwe...

By the way, the best Norwegian pronunciation of "the book" is [ˈboʊçæɪ]. Props to the first to identify the dialect.

<boka> for [botSi]? :? Is that a widespread pronunciation? That should actually be [bu:tSI] I think. "Bokji" (or just "boki") would probably be a more appropriate spelling for the pronunciation in question. It's a pretty marginal pronunciation found in a few dialects, although similar ones like [bu...

The best part is that there's lettuce at the bottom, but you'll invariably throw the thing away long before you get to it.

More importantly, is it a sandwich? (Answer: no, it's not.)

In Norway "kebab" is the döner style, and the things on skewers, which are much less common, are "shish kebabs". Most Norwegians probably wouldn't even know what "döner" means. By the way, this is what kebabs in Norway usually look like: http://i.imgur.com/GOoPC.jpg Yeah, they're pretty disgusting.

I'm on the fence about the sandwichosity of the kebab Legion posted, but hot dogs and hamburgers are definitely not sandwiches up here in Norway, which I could've sworn used to be a part of Europe at some point.

Theta wrote:tweeting? That's pretty old I think.

I assume he's referring to "twaht". I've heard about 5000 "Twitter"/"twat" jokes before though, so I don't know how new it is.

The Germanic languages have accomplished it by borrowing lots of words from languages with different stress rules -- mostly Romance languages -- and partly or completely preserving those stress rules for the borrowed words. It's very telling that Icelandic, by far the Germanic language with the fewe...

I'd like to hear a song (of a native speaker) where they diminish the distinction. James Hetfield of Metallica does it a lot. For instance the first two bars of One , where he rhymes "anything" with "dream", 1:45ish in the video. He's from California though, and many Californians do weird things wi...

I'd like to hear a song (of a native speaker) where they diminish the distinction. James Hetfield of Metallica does it a lot. For instance the first two bars of One , where he rhymes "anything" with "dream", 1:45ish in the video. He's from California though, and many Californians do weird things wi...

I believe you're supposed to centralize all vowels while singing, which obviously diminishes the /i/ vs. /I/ distinction somewhat. Dunno about merging them completely though.

Of course, there's always the other explanation for weirdnesses Oop North: 1500 years of close contact with scandinavia. Can anybody comment on how scandinavia treats the verb in question? ON apparently had ganga , with gang- as part of the stem all the way through the present tense. I did wonder i...

I said "deep hair" instead of "thick hair". I'm guessing it was a Lakotaism, where the same word is used for "deep (like water)" and "thick (like hair)". HowTF did that indistinction get stuck in my head. :? I do this sometimes. Although in general English makes far more lexical distinctions than N...

Sounds like typical 's to me :) I hear nothing out of the ordinary in those clips, so it's just the normal Swedish /i/ you're talking about then. I'm not a phonetician, so I can't really describe it in detail. I just think of that sound as cardinal , and the English "feet" vowel as more lax than th...

Dunno if this is the same thing you're talking about, but it's worth watching anyway: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUvH2dloUPM

Nancy Blackett wrote:You could also look at loanwords in Finnish, such as ranta from the source of English "strand".

Finnish never allowed initial clusters to begin with though.

In Norwegian we often say lære bort , i.e. "learn away", for "teach". However, akin to johanpeturdam's Faroese example, the typical way of saying "I teach English" would be Jeg er engelsklærer , "I'm an English teacher". Lærer can theoretically mean "learner" as well as "teacher", but in practice th...