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Danish phonology is wild.
I mean, okay, all the North Germanic languages are a bit
weird in their sound systems - but come on, Danish is something else...
and I'm not just saying that as a Swede! I mean, for real, this language stands out!
It has 26 vowel phonemes - compare that to the five of Japanese, or the six of Indonesian...
Even compare it to the other Germanic languages,
which are already known in general for their high number of vowels.
It also has stød, which means "thrust" in Danish.
This is often known as a "glottal stop", but phonologically, it's usually not.
It's actually where a syllable is split up into two parts - the first with higher-than-usual
intensity and pitch, the second with the lower, and where this second part (with the
less intense phonation) is laryngealised, which means it's said with vocal creak.
This is the difference between "hun" ("she"), without stød, and "hund" ("dog"), with stød, which
might sound like a glottal stop at first listen, but if we slow those write down...
Do you hear it?
I don't mean to take away from these features - they're rare!
Buuuut, they're not unique.
Using the same counting method as we did for Danish, Limburgish has at least 28 vowels...
And Livonian, a Finnic language completely unrelated to Danish, also has stød!
But as far as I'm aware - and correct me if I'm wrong - there's another
feature of Danish which we have not yet discovered in a single other language.
It's just one little sound... one I've already attempted to
make in this video... a simple little consonant...
The soft "d", or "blødt d", as in the final sound of the word "stød" ("thrust"). Now you've
heard how it's supposed to be pronounced, let's take a closer look at this sound,
using our old friend, the IPA - the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Generally, in broad transcription, this sound is written like this ("ð").
Broad transcription is where we ignore the finer details of sounds in speech,
and just simplify it down. It doesn't really tell us how a sound is pronounced,
only acts as a stand-in for that sound in that specific language or dialect.
This letter eth ("ð") in the IPA actually represents the
sound /ð/, the voiced dental fricative,
which you find in English words like "the" or "though", and clearly that is not [blødt d].
So how do we get from here, to the actual way this soft d sounds?
Firstly, we have to retract that, meaning move it backwards in the mouth,
because it's actually not a dental sound - it's an alveolar one.
That means that instead of having the tongue on the teeth,
the tongue is on the alveolar ridge, just behind your teeth.
Now, if we're going to make that fricative sound on the alveolar ridge instead of the teeth,
it's easy to say /z/, because that is the voiced alveolar fricative present in English.
But we're looking here for a NON-sibilant fricative.
/z/ is, just like /s/ and /ʃ/ and /ʒ/, a sibilant,
which is a type of fricative where a stream of air is directed by the tongue towards the teeth.
This gives it a higher pitch and amplitude,
which you can hear yourself when you compare /θ/ and /s/.
So instead of that /z/, we want a /ð/ but on the alveolar ridge, a [ð̠] sound.
But that's not really the soft d either. Otto Jespersen, a famous phonetician and linguist
of the 19th and 20th centuries, described the soft d as a laminal alveolar fricative.
See, in phonetics, we talk about different parts of the tongue.
The biggest division is into coronal consonants,
made with the flexible front part of the tongue, and dorsal, made with the back.
Within the coronal consonants, we have several subdivisions,
most notably for our purposes: apical and laminal.
Apical consonants are made with the very tip of the tongue,
whereas laminals are made with what's known as the blade,
the part of the tongue right behind the tip.
Jespersen writes that we can therefore pronounce this consonant properly with
the tip of our tongue on the lower teeth, thus making the blade touch the alveolar ridge: [ð̠☐].
And apparently, this is sometimes how it's pronounced, in distinct Danish,
like on the stage of the Royal Theater... but it's not the sound we all know and love.
Because, as many authors have observed, the sound is generally not actually a fricative.
To make a fricative, there has to be friction - you have to force air through a narrow space,
created by putting articulators (parts of the mouth which can be
used for making sound) close together, to create a turbulence in the airflow.
Take, for instance, /v/, where you can very easily
feel the friction between your lower lip and your upper teeth.
But the soft d doesn't put the articulators (the blade of the tongue and the alveolar ridge,
remember) close enough together to cause that friction - and we
represent that with this "lowered" diacritic.
So the final sound is an approximate: [ð̠☐˕].
Just kidding!
This sound wouldn't be complete without one final
component. Of course, it couldn't be that simple...
because the soft d has secondary articulation,
where a second part of the mouth is shaped to colour the primary articulation.
For instance, in the case of the soft d, we have velarisation,
where while you're saying the consonant, the tongue is lifted towards the velum -
that's the soft palate towards the back of your mouth you use in the sounds /k/ and /g/.
And hence, you get [ð̠☐˕ˠ].
Yeah, no surprise this sound is unique.
Oh! And like other approximants, vowels, and nasals in Danish,
it can have stød! So we get words like "blød"! How fun is that?
See, it's fully possible for a Swede to make a
whole video about Danish without any unsavoury jokes about how it sounds!
Danish phonology is not a joke; I take it very seriously.
It's a very serious, potentially chronic, throat condition, that I would never make fun of...
at least not online, where it's public for everyone to see.
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And I'll see you in the next video.