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CBC has a series where they get people to read things they wrote when they were children.
Here's a hilarious episode recorded at the Rocket in downtown St. John's, one of Canada's best cafes. :D http://www.grownupsreadthingstheywro...9fba-422502393 |
i am slightly envious of the non-english speaking immigrants in my danish class.
if you come here from morocco or indonesia, you have to learn danish. nobody is going to address you in your native language, it's either danish or silence. if you are english, everybody speaks flawless, unaccented english and enjoys practicing. if you fuck up a tiny bit in danish, they'll just be helpful and switch to your language. it makes it a bit harder to learn danish (but a million times easier to just live). the english perspective on world languages is greatly skewed due to dominance. i can go to tirana, istanbul, amman or naples, stride into a store and say "do you speak english?" as if it's not a totally weird thing. you can't do that in dutch or tagalog or chinese. |
I assume Danish is relatively easy for an English-speaker to learn, like German?
The one thing that I envy about other languages is the same sort of thing I envy about mainland cities - the lack of isolation and having relationships with neighbours. It must be so cool to be able to leave some village in rural Croatia, and travel to Warsaw, or Sofia, or Moscow and be able to understand enough to get by without ever having heard the local language before in your life. |
danish isn't that complicated but it is very hard to learn because of the pronunciation: words never sound like they are spelled. "hyggelig" is pronounced (something like) "hoogulee"; "amager" is "amar".
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Danish is a pronunciation basket case (much like Québécois, actually) where the written and spoken language seem to be totally disconnected. I lived in Sweden for a while and picked up some fluency and, though I could perfectly read Danish newspapers, I could NOT UNDERSTAND A WORD.
Of course, they could understand me in Swedish, so when I went to the restaurant, I just kinda guessed what they were saying from their body language. :D Lycka till, Kool! Quote:
I was wrong. (Though I was victorious in the end!) |
Turkish is like that too. Hungarian.
I love lyric videos for songs in languages like that. Cracks me up. But ones that are the opposite are easy to learn. Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian are like that. There's nothing that's pronounced differently. If you learn how to pronounce each letter, you can say any word correctly. You might put the emphasis on the wrong syllable, but otherwise you'll be correct. |
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The significant increase in the number of bilingual anglophones and also allophones their eagerness to use French (and the corresponding increase in the use of French in Quebec overall, especially in Montreal), is one of the main reasons the Oui did not win in 1995. In a sense, Bill 101, a creation of the PQ, was successful enough to effectively torpedo the PQ's sovereignty option in 1995. Even though it's rarely discussed in election campaigns as a major issue and does not really show up in polls of the issues Quebecers are concerned with, it's still the biggest elephant in the room and a key determinant of whether they think being within Canada is something they can be comfortable with. We shall see how the demographics (and situation on the streets) evolves over the next few years, but my sense is that many anglophones and allophones don't fully realize how much their behaviour will affect the fortunes of the sovereignist movement and a united Canada. |
I continued this conversation on FB with a friend from Bosnia. I asked him why, if Slavic languages are so similar, are certain phrases, such as "Thank you" so different in, say, Bosnian, Polish, and Russian. Three completely different words.
I don't know what answer I was expecting, but this cracked me up and made me feel stupid: "Culturally, we say different things. One is "Bless you", one is "Thank you", another "My pleasure", but we can understand all of the ones that aren't borrowed from neighbour languages. Like Polish "Thank you" is half German, but of course everyone knows German, so... no problem." ***** This has to be the stereotypical rural accent: Going up like that randomly in sentences is completely rural. It's strange for such a dominant linguistic trait to be completely absent from St. John's, but it is. This comedian even hits on it. As soon as he does it ("OMG, s'some hard!"), the audience loses it: (Baygirls = Rural women; Downtownies = Urban women) ***** One other anecdote, when jeddy1989 and I attended the grand opening gala for 351, Mayor Denis O'Keefe (born and raised in old St. John's) got up to speak. He started just by saying, "Well..." And, instantly, jeddy and I turned to each other laughing. He put about 8 syllables into that one word. It's a VERY old money St. John's thing to do. |
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It's a(n) approximate Irish accent for sure. Much more than a Newfoundland one. Although he does say by's at the start which most Canadians would identify as a Newfoundland thing. The people who produced that were probably a bit clueless. |
They certainly were. :haha: It still baffles me that they think anyone here has even heard of Comox? I thought they were mis-pronouncing Claddagh or something.
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Maybe someone on the production team was from there... |
That's probably correct. It'd have to be? Would anyone else think of that?
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Then nobody east of the Rockies probably heard of Courtenay either! Vancouver island manages to be unknown territory to most Canadians. |
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