Silent What?

For anyone who’s never heard Danish before, it’s a very difficult language to phonetically describe. People have said that the Danes sound like they’re speaking with their mouths full of potatoes, which I can sort of understand (the Danes, by comparison apparently think the Dutch are the ones that sound like they’re talking with their mouths full of potatoes). The best comparison I can think of is to imagine a Frenchman attempting to speak German with most of his mouth anesthetized— that should give you the gist of it, more or less.

Unlike certain Germanic languages, which are spoken exactly like they appear (German, Dutch), Danish has the distinction of being one of the two languages in Western Europe with the biggest differences between spelling and pronunciation; the other one, naturally, is English (enough, through, dough— think about it, people).

The Danes share our bizarre predilection towards silent consonants that no one else in the world would consider making silent (because, hey! They’re consonants!)— and they do it with a certain regularity that makes me unsure of whether the letters can actually be considered silent, or whether the Danes just fanatically abbreviate all of their words. For example: h and d are silent a lot, d almost anytime it’s in the middle of a word (and if not, it’s this strange, soft d that sounds like something between th and l). Then there’s g and v— g basically disappearing at the end of a word, and v functioning almost like a u if it’s anywhere except at the beginning of a word.

Additionally, their r is not pronounced by flicking the tongue, but rather by some uncomfortable contraction of the throat that, when attempted simultaneously by eighteen American students, sounds as if we have all just gagged on the pieces of wienerbrød our teacher gave us to eat.

Thus, the deceptively simple phrase "Hvor kommer du fra?" (where do you come from?), while actually easy to pronounce, is very misleading, because it actually sounds like it's written. Much more confusing are "Hvad hedder du?" (what is your name?), pronounced something like "veh hither du", “Hvordan går det?” (how are you?), pronounced “vor-dan gor deh”, "Hvad med dig?" (how about you?), pronounced like "veh meh dye", and all the other phrases with the three vowels that I can't explain how to pronounce, because I can't do it myself.

However, the Danish way of saying "hello", which is "hej", pronounced almost identically to our "hi", except with a shorter and quicker i sound. And their way of saying good bye is quite cute: "hej hej". That's right, it sounds just like "hi-hi".