Loukas (They/Them) 🏳️⚧️If you see a long German or Swedish word, first of all, don't panic. It's more scared of you than you are of it. Secondly, take a closer look and you'll see it's actually just three normal words in a trenchcoat, huddling together to deter predators (French and English).
Bastian Greshake Tzovaras@Loukas it’s a Selbstverteidigungsmechanismus!
@gedankenstuecke well that's easy for you to say
@Loukas as my partner’s (kindergarden-aged at the time) nephew who’s a Spanish native speaker once said: “poor guy, can you imagine? Having to learn German as a child?”
Greg Johnson@gedankenstuecke @Loukas The worst dialects are those where you painstakingly hold your breath at the end of every syllable and don’t actually finish saying it.
notsoloud@pteranodo
Try Danish! We skip half the syllables entirely.
The rest we painstakingly end in what can best be described as a sound triangulated to the exact midpoint between sigh, mumble and murmur.
If you know a Germanic language you can decipher written Danish pretty well. It's just that we gave up on pronounciation.
@gedankenstuecke @Loukasmastodon.nu
lolcat@notsoloud @pteranodo @gedankenstuecke
When I visited Denmark as an English monoglot, many years ago, it frequently felt like my ears were very, very drunk. I'd hear things like "Græd ikke over spildt mælk," understand what was being said, then immediately become lost in sighs, mumbles, and murmurs again.