Comments by "Peter Lund" (@peterfireflylund) on "NativLang" channel.

  1. raven lord we used to use that system in Denmark for a type of bus/train tickets for 30-40 years before we switched to our current electronic ticket system. If you took a late night bus, your ticket would be stamped something like 27:45.
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  2. Alice Wyan so desu!
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  3. I hate it when people write 'x' as ')('.
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  4. Camren Davis A video on the many non-sinitic languages of China would be really interesting!
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  5. IQ has got surprisingly much to do with everything.... how long you live and how healthy you will be in old age, for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lothian_birth-cohort_studies "Social Consequences of Group Differences in Cognitive Ability", Linda Gottfredson Furthermore, dyslexia is sometimes defined as being worse at reading and writing than expected given one's IQ. Writing and reading ability follow IQ pretty well. On top of all that -- which isn't nice reading -- intelligence is large genetic, provided the environment is "good enough". That isn't yet the case everywhere in the world so there is some hope for the world outside of Japan, South Korea, China, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and North America.
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  6.  @alexha-g5r  Really? Isn't that only when you count vowels of the same quality but with different lengths? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_language#Vowels Danish also has vowel length, on top of the disgusting number of vowels (+ diphthongs and stød and stress). No tones, though.
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  7. A video on sinitic languages in India would also be cool!
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  8. I am Danish and I can hear the difference between "hun"/"hund", "ven"/"vend", and "bønner/bønder" ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%B8d I can also tell the difference between three different lengths of /n/: "bunde"/"bundne"/"bundene". They are pronounced the same except for the length of the /n/.
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  9. I think the preoccupation with SVO etc word orders is mostly a thing in the US and mostly for people who have gone to college and sat through a Linguistics 101 class. I don't think many people who actually speak more than one language (or who have read centuries old texts in their own language) believe they matter all that much.
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  10. Joe Farrar No, IQ is not a poor "test" of intelligence. Of ability, sure, just as it is a bad "test" of height. Ian Deary, "Inteligence, A Very Short Introduction" is a good place to start learning more about the subject.
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  11. We have many of the letters my great-grandfather wrote home from the front during the first world war. He was a Dane from the German-occupied Slesvig, so he spoke Sønderjysk, which is a lot further away from Standard Danish than many Norwegian dialects are. His letters were in near perfect Standard Danish, though. He almost never used dialect words from Sønderjysk in those letters.
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  12. They must have been quite unusual Danes. Spoken Dutch is mostly incomprehensible Germanic gibberish with lots of throat clearing thrown in. Written Dutch is a lot easier: we can almost always tell what a text is about even though we can't say who is doing what to whom in the text. I must add, though, that it isn't all that hard to learn to understand both spoken and written Dutch, once you understand English, German, and a Scandinavian language. I can understand most of Nieuwsuur after a few months of half-assed practice.
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  13. "Conservation of sonority must not be violated...?"
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  14. Loved it!
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  15. ew dialects from (West) Jutland use a separate definite article instead of a fusional word ending.
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  16. There's no doubt that the last explanation on the list ("Norway is all dialects") is the correct one :) I'm Danish and I have always found it easy to understand some Norwegian dialects and impossible to understand others. And, unfortunately, there isn't one dominant dialect in Norway, the way there is almost everywhere else. I can't understand all the weirder dialects here in Denmark -- but nobody would expect me to. Norwegians, on the other hand, are happy and proud to speak their weird little hometown dialect on the radio and even when they are interviewed by Danish and Swedish media. They also think it is totally cool to speak it when they are at international conferences or teach at Danish universities or are visiting businesses here. We don't find it cool, though :(
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  17. @Sungindra Setiawan You didn't offend me and I agree with you. I'm just not sure it was a good example, because the dominant Jewish group is so European, arose in Italy, spent most of its time in Italy/Spain/Germany/Poland/Russia, and mainly spoke Indo-European languages except for liturgical purposes. Israel is a very new creation and Hebrew as a first language is a very new and a very old phenomenon.
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  18.  @trien30  Chinese is obviously related to Tibetan and Mandarin obviously has contour tones. Are you even Chinese? Why do you insult the feelings of a billion Chinese people? ;)
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  19. Danish has lots of German loanwords. Some of them from Low German (mainly words related to crafts, such as carpentry), some of them from High German (mainly more general and abstract words, used by the educated nobility and bourgeoisie in Copenhagen, many of whom were completely bilingual back in the day).
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  20. You recently looked at Altaic. How about taking a look at the (probable) relatedness of Indo-European, Uralic, and Eskimo-Aleut? The personal pronouns do look remarkably similar... The Eskimo-Aleutian loanwords in Northern Tungusic do seem to indicate that Eskimo-Aleut used to be spoken in Siberia as well, perhaps even originating there.
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