Tri-lingual Hobbit re-read: Chapter 15

[annathepiper]

Well, all this fun with dragons strafing Lake-town is all very well and good, but I know what you’re thinking, Internets: what’s going on with Bilbo? Good question, for which I’m sure that Chapter 15, “The Gathering of the Clouds”, will have answers!

And since I’m so far behind on getting these posts done, I’ve actually read the rest of the English edition as I write this. This post, however, will stay focused on Chapter 15.

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Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Comments

[vatine]

The longest Swedish word I know have appeared in the daily press is "ecklesiastikministersekretererare" (secretary to the minister of ecclesiastics; that is "the church minister", from back in the day when Sweden had a state church). This obviously gives birth to the word "ecklesisastikministersekreterarvikarie" (Temporary fill-in for ....), both of which are wonderful words, in their own little sing-songy ways.

[annathepiper]

*laughs!* Oh, aweseome! I don't have a lick of Swedish in my repertoire, so I didn't know that Swedish can rock the long compound nouns too.

[vatine]

Oh, I basically default "German" off of "Swedish" most of the time and that works mostly fine. As in "I can have conversations in German and when I am missing a word, I grab and mangle a Swedish word and my conversational partners don't even blink and when I confess they thought I was just good at German" mostly fine.

Swedish also rocks the consonants, if you twist the language sufficiently ("Irkutsksktskrattande" is a parseable, although unlikely outside this context, Swedish word meaning "being laughing in the manner of someoen from Irkutsk" that has 9 consecutive, individually-pronounced, consonants).

[annathepiper]

Oh, sweet. :D

[vatine]

Swedish also has 2 (well, actually 4, but you can ignore "male" and "female" most of the times, the neutral and the other neutral is where most of the grammar happens) grammatical genders and at least two gender-neutral pronouns, at least one of which is not dehumanizing.

I guess German and French are more useful, though.

[annathepiper]

Ah, it all depends on what you want to learn the language for! If you're going to talk to Swedish folks or read Swedish literature or enjoy Swedish music, I'd think studying that language would be super useful. ^_^

And wow, I'm in awe of the gender count there!