Identify Three Languages

1. Og folk hater på din “zionistiske” nyhedsdækning?! Er det mon en anden, de taler om? 2. Det er den rigtige halvdelen af tiden. Den anden halvdel er det ham den anden de taler om. 3. Ik vind het in en in triest hoe mensen elkaar zo kunnen haten. Kan er wel om janken. Zij zullen een geringe tijd lachen en een lange tijd huilen!

All three are spoken in Europe obviously, but they are also all part of a single language family! You should name the large family that these languages are all a part of, and you should also tell which two major divisions of that family each of these languages fall under. 1. was hard for me because I mistake it for similar tongues. 2. I guessed completely wrong for some reason. 3. I did get that one correct.

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0 thoughts on “Identify Three Languages”

  1. I didn’t look at the other answers but I’m guessing it’s one of the Scandinavian languages: Norwegian perhaps????

  2. All 3 are Germanic languages, but Dutch is a West Germanic language, while the other 2 are North Germanic. English in some ways resembles the Scandinavian languages more than it resembles the other West Germanic languages. Compare:
    En – They are already taken.
    Sw – De är redan tagen.
    Du – Ze zijn al genomen.
    Ge – Sie sind schon genommen.
    En – He will do it next week.
    Sw – Han skall göra det nästa vecka. (göra = do)
    Du – Hij zal het volgende week doen.
    Ge – Er wird es nächste Woche tun.

    1. Hmm, Swedish must be easy to learn for an English speaker. I know that I’ve yet to meet a single Swede that wasn’t 100% fluent in English.

      1. English is more or less an analytic language. French is a synthetic language but with many analytic traits, so it is easier to grasp French grammar than German grammar if you are an English native speaker. Most other indogerman languages are more synthetic, so it might be easier for a Russian native speaker to grasp the German language than for an English native speaker.
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_language

    2. I can imagine saying nasta vecka in my normal voice and it would feel normal. When I say stuff in French or Spanish it feels more foreign and contrived. The essential character of Germanic language pronunciation is familiar and feels natural. Plus Scandinavians, especially Danish, end up with a close to native accent in English.
      And yeah Beatrix is right, in the second example English and Swedish word order is the same and Dutch and German are the same as each other.
      German is my favourite language after English. Swedish seems cool though.

      1. >>>The essential character of Germanic language pronunciation is familiar and feels natural.
        Do you also have this opinion after listening to some of our most extreme dialects?
        Listen to this (I’ve checked these dialects, they’re authentical):
        One of the Swiss German dialects (I suppose from the East):
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wzRnV8SxgM
        Saxonian:
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-G1OTreju7k
        Kölsch (Colonia dialect):
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwmYvAtP5g8
        Berlin dialect (dialect starts at 0:35):
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNIxX1jn3lc
        Upper bavaria dialect:
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yWn08Dhv5E
        Ostfriesland dialect:
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5liTQtk28L8

        1. “Do you also have this opinion after listening to some of our most extreme dialects?”
          Sure, they don’t sound that different to normal German. You can tell they’re German.
          I’m not saying the sound is the same as English but I think is more like English than French or Spanish are (and perhaps other Germanic languages even more so than German). I feel like I don’t have to do as much of a fake voice to speak German. So that makes me think there is some similarity of character.

        2. …even though it has en enormous amount of Latin/French vocabulary, like almost everything ending in -tion.
          As an English speaker, you can decipher a lot more of a newspaper or academic text in French than in German because there is so much vocabulary in common when it comes to the bigger words.

        3. Example:
          ‘une évaluation critique de la situation politique et économique en France est difficile pour de nombreuses raisons’
          Do I need to provide a translation?
          I once had a book about Sartre in French and so many quite complex sentences were understandable without knowing much French.

        1. Grew up around Colonia, lived in several places in Germany, had a flatmate from Berlin, often travelled to Switzerland, had Saxonian colleagues and had worked in a call-center hearing customers’ dialects from most German regions (+Austria and Switzerland). So yes I know all these dialects from lots of personal encounters.

        2. Wow, I’ve read a bit through your German language classification posts and must say, you did a very good job there.
          Not quite sure about the idea of dividing German into so many “languages”; I’d prefer to stick to “dialects”. Because sure, many of the dialects are unintelligible for people who have never heard them before. But many of these dialects become intelligible very fast, so it might be enough to hear them for a couple of hours (once in your life) until you figure them out – and also figure out their neighboring dialects. So basically, if you take the hassle to figure out 7 or 8 different local dialects from different regions, you understand a good part of the German dialects.
          Many people come into contact with at least some of these “dialect families” via colleagues, television, relatives, vacation etc. quite early in their lives so you could say that most Germans understand Standard German plus 1-4 dialect families pretty well. Also, in some places, especially many of the big cities, the local dialects can hardly be found in their pure form anymore and you often hear a mix of the dialect and Standard German in everyday life (e. g. Hamburg, Frankfurt).
          A good example for a dialect which first sounds unintelligible but is relatively easy to figure out would be the Saxonian dialect of Dresden – and most other Saxonian dialects (the Saxonian Erzgebirge dialect however is very strong and difficult to understand). Saxonians tend to “torture” their vowels in a very characteristic way, but they don’t harrass their consonants too much other than not differing between certain soft consonants and their hard brothers (b-p, g-k, d-t), and they don’t swallow syllables or something. So once you figure out the few basic pronunciation rules differing from Standard German, you can understand many of the Saxonian dialects. Same goes for the Ruhrpott dialects etc.
          Swiss German dialects, Schwäbisch and many other dialects spoken in mountain regions however take much longer to understand, some people need months or even years living in those regions before they understand them, and you can even take dialect courses in Swiss adult education centers to help you get along in everyday life.

    1. WIN! I honestly didn’t look.
      The first one just has a Norwegian character, reminds me of vikings for some reason.
      Second one is similar to Dutch but not Dutch and also a little similar to German. So by proximity to these I said Danish.
      Third is obviously Dutch, that’s well known to me.

        1. To me Swedish is a bit softer than Norwegian. Norwegian has this hard and upright but quaint character.
          Does Swedish contain ‘og’ and the merged ae? They feel Norwegian to me for some reason…..btw that could be a trick for distinguishing close languages…learn a few little words that occur commonly in one but not the others.
          I had an advantage on the Danish because I know German quite well. German doesn’t have det or af but it has anden and den and er and a word similar to rigtige, so you can be forgiven 🙂
          I would have probably said Dutch for 2 if 3 wasn’t there but 3 was even more obviously Dutch. The first word I think of for Dutch is het.

      1. The Danish example did not have so many different letters and syllables, so the sample was small. And the only thing there that looks 100% “ungerman” is the “-vd-” combination. Maybe that’s the reason?

      2. Here is another excerpt of Danish. You would have known it wasn’t German form this. Your excerpt excluded some of the more obvious Danish bits . ø is very Danish to me.
        I anden halvdel af dette år vil det ikke være lettere at få løst disse spørgsmål.

  3. Robert, can you guess what language is this, without using Google and its significance??? I’ve loved and admired this sentence so much since I first came across it in a library textbook.
    “Hige sceal þē heardra, heorte þē cēnre,
    mōd sceal þē māre, þē ūre mægen lytlað.”

    The meaning is so beautiful, every-time I feel like a failure and a nobody, the philosophy summarized here bounces me back.
    This sentence like my credo and someday, if I feel like get a tattoo, I’d go for this one in a heartbeat!!!

      1. Old English – a famous passage from the poem about the Battle of Maldon written somewhere in the 10th century:
        The literal translation of this passage would be:
        “Thought should be harder; the heart the keener.
        Courage should be more; as our strength grows less.”

        1. So before the Norman invasion?
          You can tell it’s very old, at first I could imagine some creepy incantation in it. But actually it is quite beautiful to know that’s the past of my language, spoken by ancestors right here in England.
          Thanks for that.
          Also, I’m with Robert. I can detect a slightly Celtic feel. I’d like to know what it is exactly. Robert, maybe you can answer this: did the native Celtic languages influence the Germanic Anglo Saxon language that came here?

  4. Without knowing anything about the languages other than the general “feel”, I predicted that the first two were probably one or other of the Scandanavian languages, and the third Dutch.
    Looks like I didn’t do too badly?
    (I really wish I could be bothered to learn some of these languages, or indeed any languages beyond what I learned at school).

  5. If a mentally challenged tries to speak german, it sounds like Dutch.
    No seriously, i find those languages awful to listen to.

  6. Og folk hater på din “zionistiske” nyhedsdækning?! Er det mon en anden, de taler om?
    Det er den rigtige halvdelen af tiden. Den anden halvdel er det ham den anden de taler om.
    Ik vind het in en in triest hoe mensen elkaar zo kunnen haten. Kan er wel om janken. Zij zullen een geringe tijd lachen en een lange tijd huilen!
    I would argue that you are wrong in the first. I would say that both 1 and 2 are Danish. And 3 is Dutch.
    In Norwegian the 1 would be written like this:
    1. Og folk hater på din “zioniztiske” nyhetsdekning?! Er det kanskje en annen du snakker om?

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