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Sunday, November 14th, 2021
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11:00a
The Danish language's irritable vowel syndrome
"A 15-month-old Croatian child understands approximately 150 words, while a Danish child of the same age understands just 84 on average.
“The number of vowels has big significance for how difficult it is to learn a language. Many vowels makes a difficult language. [..] The official number of vowels in Danish is nine: a, e, i, o, u, æ, ø, å and y. [..] But written Danish is not the issue. The problems start when Danes speak. In spoken speech, Danish actually has some 40 vowel sounds, depending upon where the vowels are placed in words and sentence strings."
"Compared to Norwegian children, who are learning a very similar language, Danish kids on average know 30% fewer words at 15 months and take nearly two years longer to learn the past tense." (x)
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