Danish language

“ The literary development above referred to ceased almost entirely toward the end of the fourteenth century, and later, during the union with Denmark, the Danish language gradually took the place of the old Norse as a book-language, and the literature became essentially Danish. Copenhagen, with its court and its university, was the literary and educational centre, where the young men of Norway went to study, and authors born in Norway became, to all intents and purposes, Danish writers. ”

“ Its development was retarded by the use of German as the court language and of Latin as the language of literature, and in the 17th century by the inroads of French taste and phrases. In the 18th century it was again affected by the predominance of German culture, but the subsequent revival of ancient Norse studies and of a national literature developed the Danish into one of the richest and most refined European tongues. It is now not only the language of Denmark proper, but also of Norway, and of the northern part of Schleswig. ”

“ There existed no uniform literary language in the Old Danish period, although some of the most important works of the 15th century, such as Michael's Poems and the Rhymed Chronicle (the first book printed in Danish, in 1495) , on account of their excellent diction, contributed materially to the final preponderance of their dialect, that of Sealand, towards the Reformation.
Form of the language.As to the form of the language, it hardly differs at all during the period between 800 and 1200 A.D. from Old Swedish. It is only in the oldest literature that we can trace any marked differences ”

“ A gentleman upon the vessel, on my return home, having been informed in how short a time I had learned the language, declared it was impossible for any mortal man to become acquainted with the Danish language and use it as I did in so short a time ”

“ Until recently the Danes and Norwegians used no other characters in printing and writing but those known as the Gothic, or German. In the present day, however, the Latin Alphabet is being extensively employed by the best writers of Denmark and Norway, and a new and more rational system of spelling is gaining ground among the ablest cultivators of that special form of Northern speech known as Danish, or Dano-Norwegian (Dansk-Norsk) . ”

“ A thoroughly satisfactory Modern Danish grammar does not exist; the most detailed is that by K. Mikkelsen (1894) . The vocabulary of the 16th and 17th centuries is collected in Kalkar's Ordbog, mentioned above; that of the 18th and 19th centuries in the voluminous dictionary of Videnskabernes Selskab (1793-1905) , and in C. Molbech's Dansk Ordbog (2nd ed., 1859) ; that of our days in B. T. Dahl's and H. Hammer's Dansk Ordbog for folket (1903 seq.) .
As already mentioned, Danish at the Reformation became the language of the literary and educated classes of Norway and Dano-Norwegian. ”

“ Towards the end of the Middle Ages the Danish influence shows an immense increase, which marks the gradual decline of Norwegian literature, until at last Norwegian as literary language is completely supplanted by Danish. ”

“ This identity of language between cultivated Norwegians and Danes is due to political, rather than to racial causes; for although all the Scandinavian peoples retained as late as the eleventh century a sufficiently accurate acquaintance with their common mother-tongue, the Old Northern, to be able to communicate freely together wherever they met in the course of their wanderings, they soon began to adopt special peculiarities of speech, although in unequal degrees. ”

“ The language is very rich of words and sense, and of such energy, that one is often at a loss and puzzled to render it in Danish; but then again it wants words to express such things as are foreign, and not in use among them. They have monosyllables and polysyllables, but most of the last. Their words, as well nouns as verbs, are inflected at the end, by varying the terminations, without the help of the articles or particles, like the Greek and Latin. ”

“ These Danish girls were likely to appeal to a young man just returned from travels abroad, during which his emotions had been doubly stirred, for the first time, by feminine affection and by enthusiasm for a woman. They influenced me the more strongly because they were Danish, and because I, who loved everything Danish, from the language to the monuments, had, since the war, felt something lacking in everyone, man or woman, who was foreign to Denmark. ”

“ Novels, whether historical or otherwise, were scarcely in vogue in Denmark before the commencement of this present century. Fables there were, indeed—mythological allegories, tales of fairy-land, and stories of mermaids, dwarfs, magicians, and ghosts; but, except these, the only works of light literature or of imagination were poems and plays.
There is, perhaps, no language more abounding in dramatic compositions than the Danish. The Danes have a very large theatrical repertoire, consisting of tragedies, comedies, operas, farces, melodramas, vaudevilles, &c. ”

“ Even a merely literal translation of them might well consume years of labor. But Grundtvig’s plan went much farther than mere literal translation. Wishing to appeal to the common people, he purposed to popularize the books and to transcribe them in a purer and more idiomatic Danish than the accepted literary language of the day, a Danish to be based on the dialects of the common people, the folk-songs, popular proverbs, and the old hymns. ”

“ In the 16th century, again, charters written in Norwegian occur only as rare exceptions, and from the Reformation onward, when the Bible and the old laws were translated into Danish, not into Norwegian, Danish was not only the undisputed literary language of Norway, but also the colloquial language of dwellers in towns and of those who had learned to read. ”

“ The use of Danish in Norway has had the unfortunate effect of stirring up a bitter war between the two literary languages or the two dialects of the same language, but it has imposed no bonds on the literary or intellectual powers of a large part of the people, for the simple reason that these people have long used the language as their own. ”

“ The Dano-Norwegian language which was thus common to both Norwegians and Danes had, however, in the course of time become so deeply affected by Germanizing influences, that it had lost much of the special Scandinavian character, which could still be traced in Swedish, and in the various forms of the "Bondesprog" or peasant language of provincial Norway. Of this Danish and Norwegian scholars have long been sensible, and more than fifty years ago a scheme was propounded by the eminent philologist, Rasmus Rask, for the thorough reform of "Dansk-Norsk" (Dano-Norwegian) . ”

“ The business language is everywhere Danish, even in the West India islands. In Iceland, and less purely in the Faroe islands, the old Norwegian or Icelandic is spoken. The Danes are an industrious, patient, and contented people, and make good soldiers and seamen. They have regular features, blue eyes, and light hair. The religion of Denmark is Lutheran, but all creeds are tolerated. ”

“ From these dialects some philologists have attempted to construct a national tongue, and the efforts of several poets and story writers have made the movement partially successful. But still the Danish, with only dialectic differences, is the language of society, of the press, and of the pulpit, and is taught in the schools. The Norwegian dialects may be classified in three divisions, corresponding to the natural divisions of the country: the Nordenfjeld group, comprising those spoken in Drontheim and the extreme northern provinces ”

“ Else sometimes indicates a property, as Tykkelse, 'thickness;' but more frequently an action, as Anvendelse, 'application.' A similar idea is conveyed by the termination ning, as Skrivning, 'writing.' These two terminations serve to form nouns from the corresponding verbs, and thus constitute an important characteristic of Dano-Norwegian, distinguishing it from Swedish, in which the participles, and not the root of the verb, serve as the basis of words. The German mode of construction, which admits of using the infinitives of verbs as nouns, as das Schreiben, has found its way into Danish ”

“ Björn Halderson's lexicon, Icelandic, Latin, and Danish, edited by Rask in 1814, and Danish-English, by Ferral, in 1845-'54; Hornbeck's “Danish-English and English-Danish Dictionary” (2 vols., Copenhagen, 1863) .—The literature of Denmark is for the most part of recent growth. Mediæval Danish writings belong to the general literature of Scandinavia. The most important of them are the codes of the ancient kings, which belong to the 12th century, and the songs and ballads, partly derived from the Scandinavian sagas, which have been preserved by being sung by the people. ”

“ IV. Danish, like Swedish, is divided into the two great Pre- and Post-Reformation epochs of Old and Modern Danish.
I. Old Danish.—The territory of Old Danish included not only the present Denmark, but also the southern Swedish provinces of Old Danish. Halland, Skåne and Blekinge, the whole of Schleswig, and, as stated above, for a short period also a great part of England, and parts of Normandy. The oldest monuments of the language are runic inscriptions, altogether about 225 in number. ”

“ Only here they have not, any more than in music, even the virtue—if such it be—of old fashion, for the final so-called preposition is in the genius of the English language and associated with the Scandinavian—in the wider ancient sense Danish—strain of English, one of the finest strains it owns, imparting much of the plastic force which renders it flexible, the element which helped to save it from the straitlaced tendency 147of Anglo-Saxon and the awkward formality of Latin and French influence. ”

“ THE Danish occupation of England has left a very strong mark on our country in various ways—on its place-names, its racial characteristics, its language, its literature, and, in part, on its ideals. The legend of Havelok the Dane, with its popularity and widespread influence, is one result of Danish supremacy. ”

“ Swedish is more like German and the pronunciation is not as difficult to learn as that [218] of Norwegian and Danish. In Norway, there are older dialects, differing from Danish, and there has lately been a great movement in favour of a more national language. Many Norwegians regard the official Danish-Norwegian as a reminder of old subjection to Denmark and not at all fitted for the new independent Norwegian kingdom. ”

“ Educated Danes and Swedes, for instance, mutually understand each other more easily than they do one of their own countrymen in the narrower sense of the word, who speaks a popular dialect of the same language, and the difficulties that a Dane has to overcome in order to be able to appropriate the treasures of Swedish literature, or the obstacles that stand in the way of the Swede in reference to Danish books, are very slight indeed. With the language spoken in Iceland the case is a very different one. ”

“ Even, again, if a student of the English language knew nothing about the invasions of England by the fierce Danes, he might guess something about them from the fact that there are many Danish words in the English language, and especially the names of places. Such common words as husband, knife, root, skin, came into English from the Danish. ”

“ At the present moment the old and the new systems are still running their parallel courses in Denmark and in Norway, for while scientific works almost without exception, and some of the best literary productions of either country, are printed and spelt in accordance with the new system, the popular daily press, and all public notices, and advertisements, generally adhere to the German characters, and to the old forms of spelling. ”

“ Outside of the large towns and among the peasants, however, the Danish has never been the spoken tongue, but the old Norræna has been corrupted into a number of dialects, diverging more or less in their structure from their ancient original. ”

“ This merging of the two numbers under the singular has been carried especially far by the grammarian Grundtvig, who writes vi kan, skal, vil etc., although the plural forms of these auxiliaries are still very generally used, as vi kunne, skulle, ville, etc.
Distinctions of persons which have been lost in modern Danish verbs are occasionally employed in poetry, as du vilt, which represents the Old Northern form of the second person singular. ”

“ It is notorious that the Northern dialect admits Scandinavian words freely; and the same is true, to a lesser degree, of East Midland. They are rare in Southern, and in the Southern part of West Midland. 89 The constant invasions of the Danes, and the subjection of England under the rule of three Danish kings, Canute and his two successors, have very materially increased our vocabulary; and it is remarkable that they have perhaps done more for our dialects than for the standard language. The ascendancy of Danish rule was in the eleventh century ”

“ It is a delight to read them. The passage of Scripture often occurs to me when I take up these earlier works of Brandes: "He rejoiceth like a strong man to run a race." He handles language with the zest and vigor of conscious mastery. There is no shade of meaning which is so subtle as to elude his grip. Things which I should have said, a priori, were impossible to express in Danish he expresses with scarcely a sign of effort; and however new and surprising his phrase is, it is never awkward, never cumbrous, never apparently conscious of its brilliancy. ”