Sound System
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The sound system of Danish is in many ways unique among the world's languages. It is quite prone to considerable reduction and assimilation of both consonants and vowels even in very formal standard language. A rare feature is the presence of a prosodic feature called stød in Danish (lit. "push; thrust"). This is a form of laryngealization or creaky voice, only occasionally realized as a full glottal stop (especially in emphatic pronunciation). It can be the only distinguishing feature between certain words, thus creating minimal pairs (for example, bønder "peasants" with stød versus bønner "beans" or "prayers" without). The distribution of stød in the lexicon is clearly related to the distribution of the common Scandinavian pitch accents found in most dialects of Norwegian and Swedish, including the national standard languages. Most linguists today believe that stød is a development of the word accents, rather than the other way round. Some have theorized it emerged from the overwhelming influence of Low German in medieval times, having flattened the originally Nordic melodic accent, but stød is absent in most southern Danish dialects where Low German impact would have been the greatest. Stød generally occurs in words that have "accent 1" in Swedish and Norwegian and that were monosyllabic in Old Norse, while no-stød occurs in words that have "accent 2" in Swedish and Norwegian and that were polysyllabic in Old Norse. Unlike the neighboring Continental Scandinavian languages, the prosody of Danish does not have phonemic pitch. Stress is phonemic and distinguishes words such as billigst "cheapest" and bilist "car driver". Read more about this topic: Danish Dialects Famous quotes containing the words sound and/or system:“This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.” “Loving feels lonely in a violent world, | |||