undefined | Better HN

0 pointsgpvos6y ago0 comments

It would also cover the Scandinavian languages. I'd like it to include English as well, but not use any of the English-only Romance vocabulary; but there's a large chance that that would not result in anything that's useful for interacting with English-speakers. The grammar would be almost entirely based on German and Dutch with maybe one or two Scandinavianisms thrown in to make them feel a bit more at home, but for word choice all languages would take part. Non-Germanic words used in most of those modern languages would be included (like restaurant or station).

About mutual intelligibility with Scandinavian: quite a few basic words are identical in pronunciation between e.g. Swedish and Dutch, and many are similar enough that when speaking slowly you can get reasonably far, I would think, although I haven't tried that much since in practice you fall back on English all the time. When you look into the dialects there's even more you can find that's very similar.

0 comments

tom_mellior6y ago

There are some attempts at Pan-Germanic listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-Germanic_language

Of the two that have their own Wikipedia pages linked from there (Tutonish and Folkspraak) I can just about understand almost all of the examples given, though they are very short and selection bias may be at play. Also I speak English, German, and Norwegian, so I guess I have an advantage over speakers of only one Germanic language.

Especially when learning Norwegian I noticed that many words are obviously cognages with either German or English, but not both. For this reason I'm skeptical about the possibility of one vocabulary that is understandable to speakers from all branches. I don't know any Slavic language but know French and some Italian, and the Pan-Romance languages listed elsewhere in this thread seem much more readable to me than these Pan-Germanic ones because their vocabularies are more similar, I think.

henrikschroder6y ago

> Especially when learning Norwegian I noticed that many words are obviously cognages with either German or English, but not both.

There's some extra hilarity there because it's not like all three Scandinavian languages have chosen the same cognates as each other. Swedish more often picked the German version of a word instead of the Old Norse that Norwegian and Danish picked.

"window" is "vindue" in da/no, but "fönster" in se, from "fenster" in ge.

"question" is "spørsmål" in da/no, but "fråga" in se, from "frage" in ge. (Oh look, English picked the French word here!)

There's probably examples of the opposite where Swedish picked the Old Norse word, and Danish or Norwegian picked something from German instead, but I can't think of any right now.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse