News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015).

Re:Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015) by thomasfl on Thursday April 18, 2019 @06:15AM (#19689929)
Norwegian is among the languages most closely related to english. Everybody who would like to learn a second language besides english, can easily learn norwegian. Only drawback is that there are fever people speaking norwegian than there are inhabitants in new york city. Written norwegian is almost phonetic.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015) by Tade0 on Thursday April 18, 2019 @07:41AM (#19690240)
Pardon for the potentially offensive remark, but to me it always looked a lot like German.

I had German in school for a total of six years and this had a side effect of giving me the ability to read a newspaper in Norwegian with a rough understanding what the text was about.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015) by jfk13 on Thursday April 18, 2019 @09:47AM (#19690945)
Yes, Norwegian (along with Swedish and Danish) does have a fairly close connection to German.

When I began German in school (at around age 13, iirc), the fact that I had already learned Swedish as a child (due to family roots) gave me a noticeable head start over the rest of the class. Many German words that would have been completely foreign to me as an English speaker were immediately understandable through Swedish.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015) by cbnotfromthere on Thursday April 18, 2019 @07:25AM (#19690188)
Written norwegian is almost phonetic

Your claim is literally absurd.

http://www.learn-norwegian.net/pronunciation/pronunciation.h...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Lexical Distance Among Languages of Europe (2015) by gumby on Thursday April 18, 2019 @12:02PM (#19692084)
The chart you linked to shows a language with far less letter->pronunciation variance than English, so I don't quite understand your point.

Unless you're trying to say that several characters have different phonetic bindings than they do in English. This is true of most languages that use a variant the Roman alphabet as does English.

[ Parent | on HN ]