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From: ceejl@cee.hw.ac.uk (Joachim Lous)
Subject: Re: prestigious speech impediments
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Date: Tue, 13 Feb 1996 13:09:17 GMT
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Quoth Steinar Haug:
: [Cindy Kandolf]

: |   Fifteen in Norwegian, if we don't count vowel legnth.  There are nine
: |   written symbols for vowels - a, e, i, o, u, y, {, |, and }.  (Those
: |   last three won't come out right, i'm afraid; i don't have things
: |   configured properly at this end.)  

: Okay, how about a e i o u y   ? It'll work if your terminal supports
: the ISO 8859-1 character set.

: |   This is the price you pay for an incredibly simple conjugation system;
: |   the pronunciation is from hell.

: From hell? Well, no worse than for instance English :-)

Well, it depends a lot on what you already speak, of course but In general
I would say Norwegian have more difficult SOUNDS than English, just like 
French has (I'm a native Norwegian spekaer).  However, Norwegian has a 
MUCH simpler and more consistent spelling/pronounciation correlation than 
French or English.  Italian's pretty good that way I've heard.

Strangely, Italian and Norwegian have almost exactly the same
vowel pronounciation from spelling.  The 'colour' is a bit different, but
I have actually asked an English&Italian speaker to read me a Norwegian
text the way she would guess it should be pronounced according to the two 
languages, and with italian pronounciation I could actually understand 
what she was saying!  She had no idea, though.

-Joachim.
