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around to the end of the video to hear more. Danish phonology is wild. I mean, okay, all the North
Germanic languages are a bit weird in their sound systems - but
come on, Danish is something else... and I'm not just saying that as a Swede! I
mean, for real, this language stands out! It has 26 vowel phonemes - compare that to the
five of Japanese, or the six of Indonesian... Even compare it to the other Germanic languages, which are already known in general
for their high number of vowels. It also has stød, which means "thrust" in Danish. This is often known as a "glottal stop",
but phonologically, it's usually not. It's actually where a syllable is split up into
two parts - the first with higher-than-usual intensity and pitch, the second with the
lower, and where this second part (with the less intense phonation) is laryngealised,
which means it's said with vocal creak. This is the difference between "hun" ("she"),
without stød, and "hund" ("dog"), with stød, which might sound like a glottal stop at first
listen, but if we slow those write down... Do you hear it? I don't mean to take away from
these features - they're rare! Buuuut, they're not unique. Using the same counting method as we did for
Danish, Limburgish has at least 28 vowels... And Livonian, a Finnic language completely
unrelated to Danish, also has stød! But as far as I'm aware - and correct
me if I'm wrong - there's another feature of Danish which we have not yet
discovered in a single other language. It's just one little sound...
one I've already attempted to make in this video... a simple little consonant... The soft "d", or "blødt d", as in the final
sound of the word "stød" ("thrust"). Now you've heard how it's supposed to be pronounced,
let's take a closer look at this sound, using our old friend, the IPA - the
International Phonetic Alphabet. Generally, in broad transcription,
this sound is written like this ("ð"). Broad transcription is where we ignore
the finer details of sounds in speech, and just simplify it down. It doesn't
really tell us how a sound is pronounced, only acts as a stand-in for that sound
in that specific language or dialect. This letter eth ("ð") in the
IPA actually represents the sound /ð/, the voiced dental fricative, which you find in English words like "the" or
"though", and clearly that is not [blødt d]. So how do we get from here, to
the actual way this soft d sounds? Firstly, we have to retract that,
meaning move it backwards in the mouth, because it's actually not a dental
sound - it's an alveolar one. That means that instead of
having the tongue on the teeth, the tongue is on the alveolar
ridge, just behind your teeth. Now, if we're going to make that fricative sound
on the alveolar ridge instead of the teeth, it's easy to say /z/, because that is the
voiced alveolar fricative present in English. But we're looking here for
a NON-sibilant fricative. /z/ is, just like /s/ and /ʃ/ and /ʒ/, a sibilant, which is a type of fricative where a stream of
air is directed by the tongue towards the teeth. This gives it a higher pitch and amplitude, which you can hear yourself
when you compare /θ/ and /s/. So instead of that /z/, we want a /ð/
but on the alveolar ridge, a [ð̠] sound. But that's not really the soft d either. Otto
Jespersen, a famous phonetician and linguist of the 19th and 20th centuries, described
the soft d as a laminal alveolar fricative. See, in phonetics, we talk about
different parts of the tongue. The biggest division is into coronal consonants, made with the flexible front part of the
tongue, and dorsal, made with the back. Within the coronal consonants,
we have several subdivisions, most notably for our purposes: apical and laminal. Apical consonants are made with
the very tip of the tongue, whereas laminals are made with
what's known as the blade, the part of the tongue right behind the tip. Jespersen writes that we can therefore
pronounce this consonant properly with the tip of our tongue on the lower teeth, thus
making the blade touch the alveolar ridge: [ð̠☐]. And apparently, this is sometimes how
it's pronounced, in distinct Danish, like on the stage of the Royal Theater...
but it's not the sound we all know and love. Because, as many authors have observed, the
sound is generally not actually a fricative. To make a fricative, there has to be friction
- you have to force air through a narrow space, created by putting articulators
(parts of the mouth which can be used for making sound) close together,
to create a turbulence in the airflow. Take, for instance, /v/, where you can very easily feel the friction between your
lower lip and your upper teeth. But the soft d doesn't put the articulators
(the blade of the tongue and the alveolar ridge, remember) close enough together
to cause that friction - and we represent that with this "lowered" diacritic. So the final sound is an approximate: [ð̠☐˕]. Just kidding! This sound wouldn't be complete without one final component. Of course, it
couldn't be that simple... because the soft d has secondary articulation, where a second part of the mouth is
shaped to colour the primary articulation. For instance, in the case of the
soft d, we have velarisation, where while you're saying the consonant,
the tongue is lifted towards the velum - that's the soft palate towards the back of
your mouth you use in the sounds /k/ and /g/. And hence, you get [ð̠☐˕ˠ]. Yeah, no surprise this sound is unique. Oh! And like other approximants,
vowels, and nasals in Danish, it can have stød! So we get words
like "blød"! How fun is that? See, it's fully possible for a Swede to make a whole video about Danish without any
unsavoury jokes about how it sounds! Danish phonology is not a
joke; I take it very seriously. It's a very serious, potentially chronic, throat
condition, that I would never make fun of... at least not online, where it's
public for everyone to see. But there are some things we
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It is so rare that when I was first learning Danish I could literally NOT HEAR it.
My dansk teacher: "Jeg hedder..."
Me: Jeg hella? heLA? Hera? Heda?
.... ooog
det er blødt d
Årh, det fik mig til at savne at have phonetics.
Dansk må være så utrolig svært at lære fra bunden af.
Røget ørred.
Er det her alt sammen bare for at et svensker kan sige vi har soft-d´s !
Høflige butiksfraser:
Vaskuddevær?
Sgerne!
Tror jeg får spidsen af tungen til at trykke på den forreste del af ganen og den del af tungen der er i halsen til at udvide sig. Sådan siger jeg blødt d
Ah yes the rare Danish soft ==D.