A language learners’ forum

It could be something not so well-known to foreign learners .



make-up lesson

https://m.bilibili.com/video/BV1o7411C76v

Well, maybe not from my own language (Standard Danish), but a sentence with just wowels in one of the Jutish dialects:

"a æ å æ ø i æ å, æ a"

meaning:
jeg er på øen ('æ ø'= den ø) i åen ('æ å'= den å), er jeg..
I am on the island in the (small) river, am I

The inhabitants of the peninsula Jutland, the Jutes, are (or were) commonly thought not to say more than absolutely necessary, and unlike rest of the Danes they have never used a postfixed definite article. The highest accolade an entertainer could expect from a Jutish audience should be something like ..

"de_e et så ræææng endda"

det er ikke så ringe endda
it is not so bad, yet

or (to a comedian)

"a wå lie we å griiin"

jeg var lige ved at grine
I was almost at the point of laughing

Unfortunately the frivole and garroulous ways of the Copenhagueners* (and a bland version of their dialect, called 'rigsdansk' or 'Standard Danish') are spreading like the corona virus from the capital to the more remote parts of Denmark. And as you may notice when looking at a map: 'remote' in Denmark is not far away.

*roughly pronounced as /Køwenhavnårn/ in Jutish

Iversen wrote:"a wå lie we å griiin"

jeg var lige ved at grine
I was almost at the point of laughing

How interesting that “grine” means “laugh” in Danish and “cry” in Norwegian.

„Kur foruji?“
„I miesta ant verjnyjes.“
„Na, tai amyzierukis!“

A short dialogue, it illustrates linguistic decay.

„Kur foruji?“ (Wohin fährst Du?)
„I miesta ant verjnyjes.“ (In die Stadt zum Vergnügen.)
„Na, tai amyzierukis!“ (Na, dann amüsiere Dich!)

It's a mish-mash of Lithuanian from Prussia that has borrowed German words and adapted them grammatically.

Brun Ugle wrote:How interesting that “grine” means “laugh” in Danish and “cry” in Norwegian.

Same thing in my area (I think it's a feature of Southern Swedish, and as it happens, Gotland was also once ruled by Denmark).

Further reading (in Swedish):
https://www.sprakinstitutet.fi/sv/publi ... _grinar_du

Just learned this is called a double or stacked modal, but I did not realize "might could" was incorrect until I was in college. I knew it wasn't formal, and I would never use it in formal writing/speaking, but I didn't consciously think about it until I was 18 or 19. But it's pretty common in Southern American English, I've even used "I used to could" the other day then immediately after realized that wasn't exactly a standard usage.

When I first became aware I said this, I started asking non-Southerns I knew if it made sense to them and they were bewildered--the meaning of it is perfectly clear to me It's equivalent to "might be able to".

I once met a 70-year-old fisherman from a somewhat isolated island in Canada who used the word “espérer” to mean “attendre”. I thought it was both funny and pretty cool.

M’a vous espérer à brunante su’l bord du quai, he said.

Purangi wrote:I once met a 70-year-old fisherman from a somewhat isolated island in Canada who used the word “espérer” to mean “attendre”. I thought it was both funny and pretty cool.

Like Spanish and Catalan 'esperar'.

Purangi wrote:I once met a 70-year-old fisherman from a somewhat isolated island in Canada who used the word “espérer” to mean “attendre”. I thought it was both funny and pretty cool.

M’a vous espérer à brunante su’l bord du quai, he said.

Haitian Creole: Gen inè depi m ap espere w - I’ve been waiting an hour for you
M ap espere l depi maten, li pa janm vini - I am waiting for him since this moming
Of course HC also uses "tann" (cognate to attendre) more commonly for to wait, but I hear both. It seems the older French preserved in isolated areas of Quebec is also related to the original French vocabulary from which HC took these verbs from roundabout the same colonial era,.