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From: aeb@mcvax.UUCP (Andries Brouwer)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Horrible Hack to tell Scand. Languages apart
Message-ID: <845@mcvax.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 15-Oct-85 17:40:53 EDT
Article-I.D.: mcvax.845
Posted: Tue Oct 15 17:40:53 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 17-Oct-85 20:16:02 EDT
References: <518@tjalk.UUCP> <126@crin.UUCP>
Reply-To: aeb@mcvax.UUCP (Andries Brouwer)
Organization: CWI, Amsterdam
Lines: 40

In article <126@crin.UUCP> tombre@crin.UUCP (Karl Tombre) writes:
>
> Instead of "riksmaol" and "landsmaol",
> I think people often say something like "bokmaol" (language of the books)
> for the danish like and "nynorsk" (new norwegian) for the west-coast like.
>
Well, more or less. The language designed by Ivar Aasen somewhat more
than a century ago was called landsmaal, the currently official version
of it is called nynorsk. Similarly the old "danish in the mouth of
norwegians" was called rigsmaal; after the reforms at the beginning of
this century its name was changed to bokmaal. Later reforms brought
nynorsk and bokmaal closer together; the opponents to such changes
wanted to revert to the good old riksmaal.

>>Now for the other Scandinavian languages:
>>   ...........
>>Icelandic is the most inflected of the Germanic languages ...
>
>I'm not sure Icelandic can be considered as a germanic language (maybe, just
>my modest opinion).

As, no doubt, many people will tell you, the germanic languages are
traditionally divided into north- east- and west-germanic.
North germanic consists of the languages called Norr|n in Scandinavia;
among these Icelandic (and Swedish, Danish, ...).
East germanic is now extinct, but e.g. Gothic belonged to this branch.
West germanic contains German, English, Frisian, Dutch and the like.

> I have heard that
> Finnish is closely related to Hungarian. You also mention Turkish. Is it
> also in this family? I've never heard about it, but would be glad to know 
> more.
Finnish is remotely related to Hungarian (as for example English is
remotely related to Irish); the relationship doesnt help at all when
people speaking these languages try to cummunicate.
The relation to Turkish is too remote to be proved, but typologically
Hungarian and Turkish are rather similar. (But then, also English and
Chinese are typologically similar, while English and Icelandic are
very dissimilar; in other words, typology doesnt prove anything about
genetic relationships.)