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Comment by nicholas73 | Hacker News Reader

Any Danish speakers here? It should be even closer to English as that's where the Angles and Saxons are from.

The fact that the Angles and Saxons were from an area that is currently Denmark means nothing. Territories, country borders and the languages and cultures occupying them have changed significantly in the north of Europe after the collapse of the roman empire to the present day.

The angles and saxons spoke a western germanic language, whereas modern danish is a northern germanic language.

EDIT: as a side node: Frisian is the language commonly regarded as being closest to English

Yes, right here. And actually English is really a Scandinavian language (Northern Germanic), and not Western Germanic as many believe:

http://sciencenordic.com/english-scandinavian-language

Yes, Danish seems to be in between German and English, except for the first example.

  die/der/das -> [see below] -> the
  drei -> tre -> three
  Donner -> torden -> thunder
  Ding -> ting -> thing
  daher -> derfor -> therefore
  du -> du -> thou

I have no idea what happened to the definite article in Danish though:

  ein Haus -> et hus -> a house
  das Haus -> huset -> the house

Aside: The Danish capitalization rules used to mirror the German rules until after WWII, where we switched to the Swedish rules.

I'm pretty sure there are, at least I think I see Norwegians all the time : )

When you know Norwegian or Danish you can see a lot of similarities. The explanation I got was that around year 1000 Norway/Denmark was pretty much a naval superpower.

It's actually more recent. From the mid 1300's the Norwegian and Danish monarchy merged through marriage, and Denmark became by far the dominant party in the union. (Schelswig-Holsten was also for some time part of

The union lasted until 1814, when Denmark (and by extension Norway) had supported Napoleon, and Sweden had joined the other side. Sweden got Norway as a "price". But during that period, a lot of people had started preparing for an attempt at Norwegian independence. And while we entered into a looser union with Sweden, there was a long ongoing debate about creating a new, formalised Norwegian language.

We ended up with two, but one of them - bokmål - was basically Danish + Norwegian pronunciation + various spelling reforms, as this was effectively what was spoken amongst the upper classes in the cities, and this (with further spelling reforms) is the dominant written language today (the other was based on spoken dialects, and is further from Danish but not that much) .

So we've "only" had about 200 years for the languages to diverge again.

Look at my lists of Norwegian translations. Most either apply directly for Danish too, or with minor changes ("Bokmål", the written language used by a majority of Norwegians, was largely derived from Danish, and hasn't diverged all that much)

true - many people assume small, common words come from German, until they see how much closer the (especially spoken) Danish words are.

Place with the google translate pronunciation button for some simple sentences for a while - you'll be surprised how much you understand

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