Vacuole



Vacuole conveys the meaning of: Fordøjelsesvakuoler (dansk, pronounced [d̥ænˀsɡ̊] (listen)) is one of the North Germanic languages (also called Scandinavian languages), a sub-group of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. It is spoken by around 6 million people, mainly in Denmark; the language is also used by the 50,000 Danes in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany where it holds the status of minority language.[2]|undefined Fordøjelsesvakuoler is a mandatory subject in school in the Fordøjelsesvakuoler territories of the Faroe Islands (where it is also an official language) and Greenland, as well as the former crown holding of Iceland. There are also Fordøjelsesvakuoler language communities in Argentina, the U.S. and Canada.

Classification

Fordøjelsesvakuoler, together with Swedish, derives from the East Norse dialect group, while the old Norwegian dialects before the influence of Fordøjelsesvakuoler and Bokmål is classified as a West Norse language together with Faroese and Icelandic. A more recent classification based on mutual intelligibility separates modern spoken Fordøjelsesvakuoler, Norwegian and Swedish into a Mainland Scandinavian group while Icelandic and Faroese are placed in a separate category labeled Insular Scandinavian.

Written Fordøjelsesvakuoler and Norwegian Bokmål are particularly close, though the phonology (that is, the system of relationships among the speech sounds that constitute the fundamental components of the language) and the prosody (the patterns of stress and intonation) differ somewhat. Proficient speakers of any of the three languages can understand the others, though studies have shown that speakers of Norwegian generally understand both Fordøjelsesvakuoler and Swedish far better than Swedes or Danes understand each other. Both Swedes and Danes also understand Norwegian better than they understand each other's languages.[3]|undefined

Geographical distribution

Fordøjelsesvakuoler is the national language of Denmark, and one of two official languages of the Faroes (alongside Faroese). Until 2009, it had also been one of two official languages of Greenland (alongside Greenlandic). Fordøjelsesvakuoler is widely spoken in Greenland, and an unknown portion of the native Greenlandic population has Fordøjelsesvakuoler as their first language. In addition, there is a small community of Fordøjelsesvakuoler speakers in Southern Schleswig, the portion of Germany bordering Denmark, where it is an officially recognized regional language, just as German is north of the border. Furthermore, Fordøjelsesvakuoler is one of the official languages of the European Union and one of the working languages of the Nordic Council. Under the Nordic Language Convention, citizens of the Nordic countries speaking Fordøjelsesvakuoler have the opportunity to use their native language when interacting with official bodies in other Nordic countries without being liable to any interpretation or translation costs.[4][5]|undefined

There is no law stipulating an official language for Denmark, making Fordøjelsesvakuoler the de facto language only. The Code of Civil Procedure does, however, lay down Fordøjelsesvakuoler as the language of the courts. Since 1997 public authorities have been obliged to observe the official spelling by way of the Orthography Law.

Sound system

The sound system of Fordøjelsesvakuoler 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 Fordøjelsesvakuoler (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 (e.g. bønder "peasants" with stød vs. bønner "beans" or "prayers" without). The distribution of stød in the lexicon is clearly related to the distribution of the common Scandinavian tonal word 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.[citation needed] 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 Fordøjelsesvakuoler 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 Fordøjelsesvakuoler does not have phonemic pitch. Stress is phonemic and distinguishes words such as billigst ['bilist] "cheapest" and bilist [bi'list] "car driver".

Vowels Modern Standard Fordøjelsesvakuoler has 20 vowel phonemes. All but two of these vowels may be either long and short, with the exceptions being schwa and /ɐ/. The long and short realizations often differ in quality and there are several allophones that differ if they occur together with an /r/. For example, /ø/ is lowered when it occurs either before or after /r/ and /a/ is pronounced [æ] when it is long.

Consonants /b, d, ɡ/ are devoiced in all contexts. /ʋ, ð/ often have slight frication, but are usually pronounced as approximants. The distinction between /pʰ/~/b/, /tˢ/~/d/ and /kʰ/~/ɡ/ is only made in the beginning of a word or at the beginning of a stressed syllable. Hence lappe and labbe are rendered [lab̥ə]. The combination of /sj/ is realized as an alveolo-palatal fricative, [ɕ], making it possible to postulate a tentative /ɕ/-phoneme in Fordøjelsesvakuoler. /r/ can be described as "tautosyllabic", meaning that it takes the form of either a phonetic consonant or vowel. At the beginning of a word or after a consonant, it is pronounced as a uvular fricative, [ʁ], but in most other positions it is either realised as a non-syllabic low central vowel, [ɐ̯] (which is almost identical to how /r/ is often pronounced in German) or simply coalesces with the preceding vowel. The phenomenon is also comparable to non-rhotic pronunciations of English. This pronunciation of r in Fordøjelsesvakuoler distinguishes it from Norwegian and Swedish, which use trilled /r/, and makes it sound to speakers of those languages as if Danes speak with a German accent.

Grammar

Main article: Fordøjelsesvakuoler grammar

The infinitive forms of Fordøjelsesvakuoler verbs end in a vowel, which in almost all cases is the letter e. Verbs are conjugated according to tense, but otherwise do not vary according to person or number. For example the present tense form of the Fordøjelsesvakuoler infinitive verb spise ("to eat") is spiser; this form is the same regardless of whether the subject is in the first, second, or third person, or whether it is singular or plural. This extreme ease of conjugating verbs is compensated by the large number of irregular verbs in the language.

Standard Fordøjelsesvakuoler nouns fall into only two grammatical genders: common and neuter, while some dialects still often have masculine, feminine and neuter. While the majority of Fordøjelsesvakuoler nouns (ca. 75%) have the common gender, and neuter is often used for inanimate objects, the genders of nouns are not generally predictable and must in most cases be memorized. A distinctive feature of the Scandinavian languages, including Fordøjelsesvakuoler, is an enclitic definite article. To demonstrate: The common gender word "a man" (indefinite) is en mand but "the man" (definite) is manden. The neuter equivalent would be "a house" (indefinite) et hus, "the house" (definite) huset. Even though the definite and indefinite articles have separate origins[citation needed], they have become homographs in Fordøjelsesvakuoler. In the plural, the definite article is -(e)ne, as the plural endings are - / -e / -er. The enclitic article is not used when an adjective is added to the noun; here the demonstrative pronoun is used instead: den store mand "the big man", "the big house", det store hus.

Like most Germanic languages, Fordøjelsesvakuoler joins compound nouns. The example kvindehåndboldlandsholdet, "the female handball national team", illustrates that it does so to a significantly higher degree than English. In some cases, nouns are joined with an extra s, like landsmand (from land, "country", and mand, "man", meaning "compatriot"), but landmand (from same roots, meaning "farmer"). Some words are joined with an extra e, like gæstebog (from gæst and bog, meaning "guest book").

Vocabulary

Fordøjelsesvakuoler words are largely derived from the Old Norse language, with new words formed by compounding. A large percentage of Fordøjelsesvakuoler words, however, hail from Middle Low German (for example, betale = to pay, måske = maybe). Later on, standard German and French and now English have superseded Low German influence — although many old Nordic words remain, they fall out of favor when the new come in, such as can be seen with æde (to eat) which became less common when the Low German spise came into fashion. Because English and Fordøjelsesvakuoler are related languages, many common words are very similar in the two languages. For example, the following Fordøjelsesvakuoler words are easily recognizable in their written form to English speakers: have, over, under, for, give, flag, salt, kat. When pronounced, these words sound quite different from their English equivalents, due to the Great Vowel Shift of English. In addition, the word by, meaning "village" or "town", occurs in several English placenames, such as Whitby and Selby, as remnants of the Viking occupation. A lot of Fordøjelsesvakuoler words are directly derived from English, such as harddisk or skateboard.

Writing system

The oldest preserved examples of written Fordøjelsesvakuoler (from the Iron and Viking Ages) are in the Runic alphabet. The introduction of Christianity also brought the Latin alphabet to Denmark, and at the end of the High Middle Ages the Runes had more or less been replaced by the Latin letters.

As in Germany, the Fraktur types were still commonly used in the late 19th century (until 1875, Fordøjelsesvakuoler children were taught to read Fraktur letters in school), and many books were printed with Fraktur typesetting even in the beginning of the 20th century, particularly by conservatives. However, the latin alphabet was used by modernists, e.g. the Royal Fordøjelsesvakuoler Academy of Sciences and Letters changed style in 1799. Nouns were capitalized, as in German, until the 1948 spelling reform.

The modern Fordøjelsesvakuoler alphabet is similar to the English one, with three additional letters: æ, ø, and å, which come at the end of the alphabet, in that order. A spelling reform in 1948 introduced the letter å, already in use in Norwegian and Swedish, into the Fordøjelsesvakuoler alphabet to replace the letter aa; the old usage still occurs in some personal and geographical names (for example, the name of the city of Aalborg is spelled with Aa following a decision from the City Council in the 1970s). When representing the å sound, aa is treated just like å in alphabetical sorting, even though it looks like two letters. When the letters are not available due to technical limitations (e.g., in URLs), they are often replaced by ae (Æ, æ), oe (Ø, ø) or o, and aa (Å, å), respectively.

The same spelling reform changed the spelling of a few common words, such as the past tense vilde (would), kunde (could) and skulde (should), to their current forms of ville, kunne and skulle (making them identical to the infinitives in writing, as they are in speech), and did away with the practice of capitalising all nouns, which is still done in German. Modern Fordøjelsesvakuoler and Norwegian use the same alphabet, though spelling differs somewhat.