In <2j*************@uni-berlin.de> Thomas Stegen <ts*****@cis.strath.ac.uk> writes:
Mark McIntyre wrote:
I seem to recall from past discussion he's German, but I can
Hardly, Norwegian.
I can distinguish italian from french,
Italian and french are much further apart than Danish and Norwegian.
Indeed. It is trivial for any outsider to distinguish between them,
even without being able to understand any of them.
(And swedish for that matter). In some cases it is impossible
to decide whether it is Danish or Norwegian.
Written Swedish should be easier, due to the missing ø letter from the
alphabet.
Back in my CERN days, I had a Norwegian boss and a Danish colleague.
I often saw them discussing, in some strange language and I finally
asked my boss what was the common language they used. The answer was:
"well, I talk Norwegian and Jes talks Danish".
so I can't see why a german is disallowed
from telling danish from norwegian. :-)
I can't see that either. But I would imagine my claim
to competence in that particular area outdoes that of most
germans though ;)
And I'd be *very* surprised if the average German could tell Danish from
Norwegian.
The Romance languages are all easy to tell from each other, Turkish, Greek
Hungarian and Finnish are easily identifiable and the difference
between German and Dutch is also fairly obvious. Scandinavian languages
can be easily recognised as a group, and so are Slavic languages used
in Central Europe, but it's rather tricky to make distinctions inside
each group, as an outsider. Well, maybe Polish is easier to identify than
the rest, due to its "impossible" words and fancy diacritics. And if it
doesn't fit anywhere above, it's probably a Baltic language ;-)
Of course, things get a lot more complicated if one considers more than
the official language of each European country...
Dan
--
Dan Pop
DESY Zeuthen, RZ group
Email:
Da*****@ifh.de 
