Re: The definition of the Standard variation of British English

On Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:49:08 -0700 (PDT), sigvaldi
<sigvald@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Jul 13, 6:31 pm, Hatunen <hatu...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mon, 13 Jul 2009 04:30:33 -0700 (PDT), Ilpo





<ilpo...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jul 13, 1:14 pm, "Arne H. Wilstrup" <ahw> wrote:
"Hatunen" <hatu...@xxxxxxx> skrev i meddelelsennews:m3pk55dg4kiornq2p11ljoo0vg5p0vear1@xxxxxxxxxx

I'll pose the question to you: Are Danish, Swedish and Norwegian
distinct languages or all dialects falling under the rubric of
"Sandinavian"? And what aboutIcelandic? Finnish official
Swedish?

Danish, Swedish and Norwegian andIcelandicare different languages, but
they derives from the same stock - Finnish derives from the Hungarian-
Finnish group and has not anything to do with "Scandinavian".

There's no doubt Danish, Swedish, Norwegian andIcelandicare
considered different languages now, but as you said, they derive from
a common origin, so there must have been time when this wasn't equally
unambiguous. Finnish Swedish, or Finnish-Swedish, which Dave was
referring to (note that there was no reference to Finnish language in
his post), on the other hand, is pretty much unanimously considered to
be a local variant of Swedish. Swedish speaking Finns and Swedes
typically have very little difficulty understanding each other,

Nor, I understand, do Norwegians and Danes. I am not alone in
suggesting that Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are dialects of the
same language.

though
there are some differencies in pronunciation and vocabulary.


They are dialects of the old Norræna, and as Icelandic is the modern
form of that language you could say that they are dialects of
Icelandic.

http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=90975 shows the
language tree:

Germanic (53)
North (11)
West Scandinavian (5)
Faroese [fao] (Denmark)
Icelandic [isl] (Iceland)
Jamtska [jmk] (Sweden)
Norn [nrn] (United Kingdom)
Norwegian, Nynorsk [nno] (Norway)

--
************* DAVE HATUNEN (hatunen@xxxxxxx) *************
* Tucson Arizona, out where the cacti grow *
* My typos & mispellings are intentional copyright traps *
.

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