More weird language things

[Mattias Westlund]

Watching an episode of Half in the Bag recently--I don't remember what movie it was--Mike (Stoklasa, of Red Letter Media fame) offhandedly used the word "schmutz" when describing someone having a dirty face or something like that. Jay, or Rich, or whoever else was on the show at the time, just nodded at his comment. But I was intrigued. The Swedish word for dirt, not as in soil, but as in something messy you get on your hands or face or whatever, is "smuts". It's basically the same word, but I've never encountered it in American English before! I understand it's from Yiddish and by its very nature European/Germanic in origin, but still. I was like, "did he just say what I thought he said?"

Anyone else have any weird language-related and surprising things like that?

[PPH]

I like that kind of stuff too. By the way, "Schmutz" is German too (which isn't surprising, since Yiddish can be considered a German dialect).

[Nayrb]

I love Red Letter Media. I want to get one of those mugs with the graphic of Rich Evans sitting on the couch

I'm not sure if I'm correct here because I haven't had a chance to verify (I guess you can tell me), but when I was a kid and didn't understand a thing about Scandinavian languages other than that bands I liked spoke them, I was watching an Ingmar Bergman movie at a friend's house and was surprised when a character started yelling "Stop! Stop!" These days I'd say, "Oh yeah, I can see how that's a word in both English and Swedish," but back then I didn't even know the languages were related.

I know what you mean; it's pleasantly weird when your expectations are jostled like that!

[Mattias Westlund]

Very late response, but...

Yeah, "stopp" is a word in Swedish too. Not sure if we got it from English or the other way around. There's tons of similarities but they're probably not super obvious when you hear someone speaking Swedish, as opposed to seeing the words in writing. All of it originated somewhere in Germany in ancient times anyway, though German and Swedish are more closely related than English and Swedish, to the point where I can actually kind of understand German though never having learned the language. In many ways German feels like archaic Swedish. To my understanding there was a grammar and spelling reform in Sweden in the 16th century, and after that things got increasingly different. But to this day, it's very easy for Germans to learn Swedish, and vice versa.

[Mattias Westlund]

Actually, I have an fun anecdote about Swedish and German and how similar the languages actually are.

In the late nineties I was at a party and met a girl who was a German exchange student. She couldn't speak a word of Swedish so she was obviously a little uncomfortable at this all-Swede social event (I don't even know how she ended up there in the first place). We conversed in English, though she wasn't super fluent in that language either, so everything was very awkward.

Fast forward a year, I was out doing some shopping, and this vaguely familiar-looking girl comes up to me and says in perfect Swedish: "You were at that party last year, weren't you?" At first I couldn't place her, and didn't pick up on the subtle accent. We have A LOT of dialects here. Then I realized who she was and my mind was blown. She went from being completely new to the language to sounding like 95% native Swede in ONE YEAR. Admittedly she might have had an unusually good ear for it, but still. The tongues are close, very close.

[Nayrb]

(06-27-2021, 11:46 PM)Mattias Westlund Wrote: Very late response, but...

Yeah, "stopp" is a word in Swedish too. Not sure if we got it from English or the other way around. There's tons of similarities but they're probably not super obvious when you hear someone speaking Swedish, as opposed to seeing the words in writing. All of it originated somewhere in Germany in ancient times anyway, though German and Swedish are more closely related than English and Swedish, to the point where I can actually kind of understand German though never having learned the language. In many ways German feels like archaic Swedish. To my understanding there was a grammar and spelling reform in Sweden in the 16th century, and after that things got increasingly different. But to this day, it's very easy for Germans to learn Swedish, and vice versa.

(06-28-2021, 12:10 AM)Mattias Westlund Wrote: Actually, I have an fun anecdote about Swedish and German and how similar the languages actually are.

In the late nineties I was at a party and met a girl who was a German exchange student. She couldn't speak a word of Swedish so she was obviously a little uncomfortable at this all-Swede social event (I don't even know how she ended up there in the first place). We conversed in English, though she wasn't super fluent in that language either, so everything was very awkward.

Fast forward a year, I was out doing some shopping, and this vaguely familiar-looking girl comes up to me and says in perfect Swedish: "You were at that party last year, weren't you?" At first I couldn't place her, and didn't pick up on the subtle accent. We have A LOT of dialects here. Then I realized who she was and my mind was blown. She went from being completely new to the language to sounding like 95% native Swede in ONE YEAR. Admittedly she might have had an unusually good ear for it, but still. The tongues are close, very close.

That's all awesome! I might have already said all this, but English was originally just basically a dialect of Old High German (hence the name Anglo-Saxon), but about the 1300s, an already Germanic-influenced form of Norman French started to influence it a great deal (and it became Middle English). By the late 1400s it was starting to get to be pretty recognizable as what it is today. If you have any interest in that sort of thing, you can check out the Norton Critical Edition of Mallory's Le Morte Darthur, which is more or less presented as it was, in a form of Early Modern English. If you want to go back to Middle English, you can probably find Chaucer in the original online easily enough, and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is available in a facing text version by Winny. You can find facing text editions of Beowulf easily enough. My skills with Old English are pretty much just phonetic: I can pronounce stuff reasonably correct, but I don't always know what the words actually mean I think the modern language related most closely to English is Frisian. It's cool because it's an offshoot of OE: It was described to me as Anglo-Saxon that went abroad while English stayed home. It had different influencing factors and came out way different (of course).

That's fascinating about the girl learning Swedish so fast, though! I do know some people who are sponges for languages. I'm not one of them, unfortunately. I had a bit of Spanish, but I've lost most of it since college. I didn't realize that Swedish and German are that close. Is it similar in syntax?

[Chris Spyratos]

(06-28-2021, 02:37 AM)Nayrb Wrote: That's fascinating about the girl learning Swedish so fast, though! I do know some people who are sponges for languages. I'm not one of them, unfortunately. I had a bit of Spanish, but I've lost most of it since college. I didn't realize that Swedish and German are that close. Is it similar in syntax?

Not trying to answer your question but Swedish are very fun to learn! I took them up as a hobby on a free learning platform during the lockdown situations and I was fascinated. I think there are many similarities with English when it comes to constructing a phrase. Having studied German in high school I don't think I found that many similarities, some words maybe here and there but the framework was a lot similar to my understanding of English. I really like the German language and up to some point I can comprehend it, but I find it really hard to actually use it to express something. Scandinavian languages have a certain charm, especially when spoken and I read somewhere that Swedish is the language to learn if you want to have an easy start into this language family. It seems like a very vague generalization but it was enough to make the choice for me.

English language has such a big part in our every day lives that we tend to overlook the fact that it has its own origins, history and close relatives. And it really evolves. Didn't know about the Frisian language, cool stuff. Another part that fascinates me is the mechanics of each language. Beyond the obvious differences like the aphabet, it is how they treat the words to convey different meanings.

[Nayrb]

(06-28-2021, 07:51 PM)Chris Spyratos Wrote: English language has such a big part in our every day lives that we tend to overlook the fact that it has its own origins, history and close relatives. And it really evolves. Didn't know about the Frisian language, cool stuff. Another part that fascinates me is the mechanics of each language. Beyond the obvious differences like the aphabet, it is how they treat the words to convey different meanings.

Middle English is fun for that because it has a lot of cognates, or "false friends," words that look familiar to modern English speakers but that meant different things in that period. I can't quite recall any off the top of my head, unfortunately.

[Mattias Westlund]

(06-28-2021, 02:37 AM)Nayrb Wrote: I didn't realize that Swedish and German are that close. Is it similar in syntax?

It's not super similar. For a Swede, German is a bit like Yoda-speak, everything comes in the wrong order. I don't know if it's because I'm a language geek with a penchant for the fantasy genre, and thus have read a lot of archaic-tinged Swedish, but I definitely feel there's a strong resemblance between the languages.

(06-28-2021, 07:51 PM)Chris Spyratos Wrote: I read somewhere that Swedish is the language to learn if you want to have an easy start into this language family.

That sort of makes sense, even though I think Norwegian would be a good candidate as well. Swedish and Norwegian are pretty similar. Icelandic is probably harder, though a lot closer to the original tongue spoken all across Scandinavia in the days of old. As for Danish, forget about it. I'm not even sure the Danish themselves understand Danish.

[Nayrb]

(07-10-2021, 06:47 PM)Mattias Westlund Wrote:

(06-28-2021, 02:37 AM)Nayrb Wrote: I didn't realize that Swedish and German are that close. Is it similar in syntax?

It's not super similar. For a Swede, German is a bit like Yoda-speak, everything comes in the wrong order. I don't know if it's because I'm a language geek with a penchant for the fantasy genre, and thus have read a lot of archaic-tinged Swedish, but I definitely feel there's a strong resemblance between the languages.

I think English in the fantasy genre is also intentionally archaic. There's so much romanticization (that a word?) of the older forms and conventions of English in fantasy (not that I'm complaining, of course). A lot of it is kind of Yoda-speak to a modern speaker of English, in the end. As I'm sure you're more than aware

Syntax is very interesting. It's one of the more challenging aspects of learning a language. Old English (Anglo-Saxon) isn't very much like modern English at all in terms of the order in which stuff happens, and it even has cases, whereas modern English does not. I'm a fan of Maxims II from the Exeter Book. One passage, quoted in my Teach Youreslf Anglo-Saxon book is pretty cool, and shows how alliterative the language was and how it had a neat rhythm to it. I'm going off the top of my head here for a translation. -an = the infinitive of a verb in OE:

...Cyning sceal on healle
beagas dælan.      Bera sceal on hæðe,
eald and egesfull.      Ea of dune sceal
flodgræg feran.      Fyrd sceal ætsomne,
tirfæstra getrum.      Treow sceal on eorle,
wisdom on were.      Wudu sceal on foldan
blædum blowan.      Beorh sceal on eorþan
grene standan.      God sceal on heofenum,
dæda demend

"King shall on hall rings deal [to deal/dole out].
Bear shall on heath, old and terrible.
River of mountain [or hill] shall flood-gray [to] flow.
Troop shall [together...something, maybe shining to march or go forth??]
Truth shall on earl, wisdom on man [were = root of were-wolf?]
wood shall on fold [hillside?] [something] [to] bloom/blossom.
Town/city shall on earth green [to] stand. God shall on heaven deeds judge."

I'm always fascinated by this stuff. It seems our sense of rhythm in both music and speech are connected, and both are sort of half objective/half objective, based on our limited human faculties.