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
Jens@notsoloud @pteranodo @gedankenstuecke as a Swede growing up in southern Sweden with Danish television and lots of trips to Copenhagen, I can sound (to other Swedes) surprisingly Danish by just letting the vowels/consonants vaguely taper out in the end of the last syllable.
@notsoloud @pteranodo @gedankenstuecke by the way, don't know if this is true for Danish speakers, but to me (a Swedish speaker) written Dutch looks like I'm having a stroke. I understand half the words, but the other half looks like I should understand them, I just don’t.
(Edit: fixed spelling/wording)
Dr David Mills@doculmus @notsoloud @pteranodo @gedankenstuecke as a native English speaker, Dutch looks the same to me.