donn post_id=57438 time=1524344366 user_id=60 said:
I wouldnt do that!
Danish language
Donn,
I enjoyed that video very much. It looks to be a piss-take by Norwegians concerning the way that Danes speak. About 2.24 in the clip when the guy in the shop grabs the big fellow with the puncture he indicates that he cannot understand a word he is saying and tells him to f*** off!
If you didnt know already, and without boring you with too many details, Danish and Norwegian are very close, and can sometimes be identical in the written form. However, the Danish pronounciation bears little resemblance to the written form, to the point where Norwegians have great difficulty in understanding what Danish people are saying. The Danes have what is known as the glottal stop which is also found in various English speaking dialects, but most dialects of Norwegian do not have it and the words are pronounced more or less phonetically. Also, Danish speech is more gutteral than Norwegian and they often only pronounce the first part of a word clearly with the end syllable often being dropped or abbreviated. Danes also cannot pronounce the letter r, whereas all other Scandinavians have a strong trilled r. Most English Brits have the same issue. We do tend to trill it here in Scotland, but it isnt as strong as it is in either Norwegian or Swedish.
Im not a native speaker of either Danish or Norwegian, but lived and worked in Norway for a while and I have family who live there. I have also visited Denmark several times and have several Danish friends who now live in the UK. The Swedes have a markedly different written language, but Swedes can usually understand Norwegians, whereas the reverse is not the case.
I wont dwell too much on Finland except to say that there is a Swedish speaking minority there.
To illustrate Danish directness, theyll typically just say, giv mig en øl (give me a beer) at a bar. Now, in Scotland we tend to do the same as the Danes, and nobody in either country would likely take offence at that request. There is nothing rude in either Scotland or Denmark about leaving out please or any other niceties that apply in other English speaking countries.
FWIW if I go to Sweden or Norway, and try to converse with them in their own languages they automatically think Im Danish because I speak with a glottal stop and a weak r.
What has this got to do with accordions? Absolutely nothing, so Id better stop ranting before I get machine gunned for not talking about playing the box (again!).
The accordion is still fairly popular in all of the Scandinavian countries, even although no two countries can decide on the same treble system.
Hopefully the above gobbledegook will serve to illustrate how different users of the same basic language can sometimes turn the most innocent of discussions into total war situations.
Maybe English isnt the best medium for forums on account of that , but dansk er nok værre (Danish is possibly worse), as you have suggested.
With regard to playing in public, here in Scotland where there is a strong national tradition of accordion, people expect every accordionist to be able to play the bread and butter Scottish repertoire they are accustomed to. Anybody who cannot deliver such delights is not worthy of listening to, and it really is as simple as that. I used to listen to a very accomplished Scottish professional player, who shared my preference for French musette, and would regularly play in French restaurants in Scotland when he wasnt playing at venues in France. Despite the fact that his renditions of French music were superb, on almost every occasion some drunk would insist that he played a well known Scottish accordion number. His accordion wasnt tuned to play Scottish music, but he would hammer out the requests with his tongue firmly in his cheek.
His reward would typically be That was OK, but your accordion sounds out of tune. He played a top of the range custom built French instrument that nobody on this earth could have got to sound like a Scottish musette tuned accordion. No wonder that he looked forward to performing in front of appreciative audiences in France. If I had been half as good as he was I might have risked trying to convince a Scottish audience that I was worth listening to. The fact is that Im not so I play at home.
