Category: Faroese (Føroyskt)

Exploring Copenhagen / Udforskning af København

By Simon

Today I am in Copenhagen on the way to see a friend in Aarhus. I left Bangor at way-too-early o’clock this morning, and arrived in Copenhagen early this afternoon. I’m staying in an AirBnB in Sydhavn, not far from the centre of the city. One of my hosts is from Moldova, and the other is a Dane, who I haven’t met yet. I spoke a bit of Russian and Romanian with my Moldovan host, which she seemed pleased to hear.

This afternoon I explored the touristy part of Copenhagen, and saw some nice parks, a castle, lots of boats, including a tall ship, a little mermaid, and some interesting buildings. I heard quite a few different languages being spoken, including Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese and other flavours of Chinese, English, French and even a bit of Danish. My knowledge of Danish is limited – I can read Danish quite well, and speak and understand it a little.

Cycling seems to be a popular way to get around here, perhaps because Copenhagen is so flat. There are plenty of cycle paths, and even traffic lights for cyclists. There are also many cargo bikes – three-wheeled contraptions with a large container on the front for shopping, children, pets or other things. Some cyclists indicate they’re stopping by raising their arm, as if asking a question, which is practical, but looks quite funny to me.

Here are a few photos:

Copenhagen / København

Tomorrow I’m off to Aarhus to see a Czech friend who teaches Linguistics at the university there. We usually speak a mixture of Czech, English and Welsh, and now we can add some Danish to the mix.

Later addition – I’ve met both my hosts now – the guy is actually from the Faroe Islands, and we’ve just had a very interesting conversation about Faroese and other languages. He told me that they used to borrow a lot of words into Faroese, especially from Danish, but now tend to create new words from Faroese roots. He finds it hard to understand some of the new words, as he’s not used to using them. They speak English to each other, by the way, as he doesn’t speak Russian or Romanian, and she speaks only a little Danish, and no Faroese.

Morning food and early meals

By Simon

Breakfast in Northern Germanic languages

Yesterday I learnt that the Danish word for breakfast is morgenmad [ˈmɒːɒnˌmað] (“morning food”), which makes sense [source].

Lunch is frokost (“early meal”), which made me think of the German word for breakfast Frühstück (“early piece”).

Frokost comes from the Middle Low German vrōkost (early meal), from vrō (early) and kost (meal, food) [source].

In Norwegian frokost is breakfast, and lunch is lunsj.

In Swedish breakfast is frukost and lunch is lunch.

In Danish dinner is aftensmad (“evening meal”), or middag (“midday”), which also means noon, banquet or lunch. In Norwegian and Swedish middag means dinner, noon or midday [source]. Somewhat confusing!

In Icelandic the meals are: morgunmatur (breakfast – “morning food”) hádegismatur (lunch – “noon food”) and kvöldmatur (dinner – “evening food”) [source].

In Faroese morgunmatur means breakfast, lunch or a snack [source]. Lunch is also miðmáli [source]. Dinner is døgurði [ˈtøːvʊɹɪ], which can also mean lunch [source], or nátturði [ˈnɔtːˌʊɹɪ] = dinner, supper (main) meal in the evening [source].

What do you call the different meals?

The first meal of the day is breakfast for me, whenever I have it. The meal in the middle of the day I used to call dinner, but now call lunch. The evening meal I call tea, or dinner if I eat out somewhere.

Honey eaters, brown ones and tramplers

By Simon

A Eurasian brown bear

In many European languages the words for bear have their origins in taboo avoidance. It is thought that people who spoke Proto-Indo-European (PIE) believed that if you called a bear by its true name, it would hear you and may harm you. So instead they used different names when referring to bears [source].

The words for bear in Germanic languages can be traced back to the PIE *bʰer- (brown), via the Proto-Germanic berô (bear).

Examples include bear (English / West Frisian), beer (Dutch / Afrikaans), Bär (German), Bier (Luxembourgish), björn (Icelandic / Swedish), and bjørn (Norwegian / Danish / Faroese) [source].

In Slavic languages the words for bear can all be traced back to the Proto-Slavic word medvědь, from *medu-ēdis, from medъ (honey) &‎ *(j)ěsti (to eat), so could be translated as “honey eater”.

Examples are медведь (Russian), médved (Slovenian), medvěd (Czech), niedźwiedź (Polish). The Hungarian word for bear, medve, possibly comes from the same root [source].

In Baltic languages the words for bear from the Proto-Baltic *talk-, *tlāk-, from Proto-Indo-European *tel-k-, *tl-ek- (to push, to hit, to kick, to trample), and could be translated as “trampler”, “stomper”, “pounder”, [source]. In Latvian the word is lācis, and in Lithuanian it’s lokys.

The PIE word for bear was *h₂ŕ̥tḱos, which is possibly related to destroying or destruction – another taboo avoidance? This is the root of *artos in Proto-Celtic, άρκτος (árktos) in Greek, ursus in Latin and ari in Albanian, and related words in modern Celtic and Romance languages [source].

One language

By Simon

Omnigot logo

Yesterday I say a post in the Silly Linguistics Community on Facebook challenging people to write a sentence in all the languages they speak. This is what I came up with:

Tha e duilich writing une phrase ym mhob språk atá agam, pero ich 試試 red ennagh symoil を書く, kaj nun я хочу říct že il mio tomo tawa supa está cheio de țipari.

This means “It is difficult writing a sentence in every language I speak, but I will try to write something interesting, and now I want to say my hovercraft is full of eels”.

The languages, in order, are Scottish Gaelic, English, French, Welsh, Swedish, Irish, Spanish, German, Chinese, Manx, Japanese, Esperanto, Russian, Czech, Italian, Toki Pona, Portuguese and Romanian.

It’s not the best sentence ever, perhaps, but I enjoyed the challenge of putting it together. It also got me thinking about how many languages and writing systems I could use in a version of my motto “one language is never enough“. This motto appears on some versions of my logo, such as the one above, and I usually try to write it in several difficult languages.

Here are some versions I came up with today. The first version incorporates some of the languages I speak and am learning, plus a few others.

Une singură 语言 är nikdy недостаточно – languages = French, Romanian, Chinese, Swedish, Czech / Slovak, Russian.

Ett seule 言語 ist nunca yn ddigon – languages = Norwegian / Swedish, French, Japanese, German, Portuguese / Galician / Spanish, Welsh.

Jeden lingua er niemals suficiente – languages = Czech / Polish / Slovak / Rusyn, Asturian / Chamorro / Corsican / Galician / Italian / Latin / Sicilian / Interlingua, Danish / Faroese / Icelandic / Norwegian, German, Spanish / Asturian.

Can you incorporate more languages and/or writing systems into this phrase?

Scandinavian Mutual Intelligibility

By Simon

Scandinavian languages

The other day I meet a Faroe Islander, and one of the things we talked about was mutual intelligibility between Scandinavian languages.

I was under the impression that Faroese and Icelandic were closely related, and assumed that there would be quite a bit of mutually intelligibility between them.

She told me that this is true to some extent – if you know Faroese, you can understand written Icelandic quite well, but spoken Icelandic is more difficult to follow.

I also thought that Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are more or less mutually intelligible. I’ve been learning Swedish for a while now, and can make some sense of written Danish and Norwegian, and understand the spoken languages to a limited extent.

Everyone in the Faroe Islands learns Danish, which is very close to Norwegian, so they can understand both languages. According to my Faroese informant though, Swedish differs more from the other Scandinavian languages and is more difficult to understand.

If you speak one or more of the Scandinavian languages, how much can you understand the others?

Autos and bils

By Simon

Yesterday I discovered that the Swedish for car is bil [biːl], which is related to the Icelandic bíll [bɪtl̥]. At first I wasn’t sure where these words came from, then realised that they are probably abbreviations of automobile.

The Swedish word does in fact come from automobil, according to Wiktionary. The same word is also found in Danish and Norwegian. In Faroese the word for car is simliar: bilur [ˈpiːlʊɹ].

The word automobile comes from the French automobile, from Ancient Greek αὐτός (autós – self) & the French mobile (moving), from the Latin mobilis (movable). In French this can be shortened to auto [source].

For details of the word car, see this post.