The Greenlandic Language! (and a brief history of Greenland) - SpeechLeech 'G'  

That's sad, but I suppose with so many languages in the world, Greenlandic isn't at the top of many people's list to learn. I suppose we all have our own reasons to study the languages we study, so I'm sure there are people who pick Greenlandic. Heck, there are are people who study Latin, Old Norse, or Anglo-Saxon instead of a modern Romance language, a modern North Germanic language, or English (OK, I admit, I have done a little studying of Gothic, but it has no modern descendant, so perhaps that's different). Different strokes.

Suminngaanneerpit?

Skål, Grønlænder, jeg er meget glad for at se og høre dit folk, hilsner fra Danmark))❤❤❤😊😊😊

TorraK 👍🏼

Very true, but the difference here is that in Paraguay Guaraní is co-official with Spanish, while in Greenland, as of 2009, Danish is no longer “co-official”. It’s literally just Greenlandic.

@@imshawngetoffmylawn Also you said it was for 'semi-independent' countries so that doesn't include Paraguay

It's still pretty cool though ;)

@@imshawngetoffmylawn , bogstavelig - alle grønlænder snakker dansk. Der findes hele ikke rene grønlænder, de er alle sammen blanding med dansker. Это для информации. Управление называется Самоуправление - Selvstyre.

So Interesting! 👏🏼👍🏼

Jeg elsker Grønland)))

He's an attractive man, no doubt, but his beauty isn't that good.

Greenlandic word for computer is qarasaasiaq and the word for mouse is teriaq, which does mean mouse.

@@bentsivertsen4968 Wonderful! That's quite close. When a new object or idea is imported into a culture, there is always a choice between adopting the foreign word or creating a word from elements of the receiving language. For example, English and most European languages call the phenomenon of "electricity" by some form of the Greek word ηλεκτρισμός. Danish, Swedish and Norwegian call it "elektricitet". But the Icelanders, always determined to do things their own way, call it "rafmagn" (which I think means "amber power" since if you rub a piece of amber with a cloth you will get a spark of static electricity). The notoriously stubborn Finns call it "sähkö" --- I don't know its etymology, but it is clearly not derived from the Greek word, or borrowed from any neighbouring language. The Estonians, who speak a language very closely related to Finnish, say "elektrit". Curiously, Canadians use the terms "electricity" in English and "électricité" in French, but when it comes to referring to the electricity on a power grid call it "hydro". The power grid in Ontario is called "Ontario Hydro" and the one in Quebec is "Hydro‑Québec". When I lived in the United States I once asked someone how much they paid for "hydro" and how big was their monthly "hydro bill".... and I got confused looks of incomprehension. But every Canadian uses this term.

Texas German seems a lot closer to Standard German than Pennsylvania German is (IIRC, the language is called Pennsylvania German where the people who speak it are known as the Pennsylvania Dutch). I'm pretty sure that Wikitongues has Pennsylvania German examples.

@@ghenulo Texas German is indeed a lot closer. Basically the story there is that by the time of the 19th century when German immigrants were coming to the midwestern US, Standard German had become something not only written but also spoken aloud. In many areas of German settlement, there were numerous people of different dialects and so some parents chose to teach their children Standard German instead of their own dialect to facilitate communication, almost the same reasons many people in Germany proper did. The result of this is that Texas German doesn't come from any one dialect of German per se but rather Standard German itself, albeit one that split off of German in the 19th century and has absorbed English words besides coming up with their own coinings. This is a kind of dialect leveling essentially. The same thing happened in Pa Dutch but it happened earlier and went in a different direction. The first of the Pa Dutch arrived in the late 17th century with the bulk arriving in the early to mid 18th century. Immigration would continue at a slower pace until more or less the Napoleonic wars, after which Western Expansion in the US led new German immigrants to settle in the Midwest, thus Texas German (they also came from different parts of Germany, and of course Germany actually existed now, more heavily coming from eastern and northern Germany rather than Pa Dutch's primarily southwestern, Alsatian, and Swiss roots) Enough of the Pa Dutch came from Palatine speaking areas, a particular dialect, that all the other speakers by the end of the 18th century were leveling out into that Palatine base, this is why Pa Dutch can more or less be said to be a Palatine dialect (because of historical reasons there are actually a number of Palatine derived dialects found (originally) outside modern German speaking Europe). Both the people and the language are called both Pa Dutch and Pa German. Pa Dutch is used by the Pa Dutch as the preferred term for both their language and their culture. Pa German is mostly used by academics, again to refer to both the language and the people (though there you have to make it plural and say "Pa Germans"). For example most of my ancestors came from what's now northern Baden-Württemberg, but a number were also Alsatian and Swiss. This is part of why the Pa Dutch prefer 'Dutch' over 'German,' many of them didn't originally come from Germany nor did Germany as a state even exist at the time they did. It was still HRE days back in the 18th century. The reason for Dutch specifically is because in the past and still to this day in proper nouns like Pa Dutch, the word didn't refer to the language of the Netherlands and Flanders but rather to all continental west Germanic languages. Including High German, Low German, Dutch, and (maybe) Frisian(s). The use of the word in 'Pa Dutch' is a retention of this older meaning, something which was retained longer in American English specifically. (interestingly, there are numerous idioms in English relating to the Dutch that often deal with money like "going Dutch" when getting food at a restaurant that probably derive not from the Dutch proper but from the Palatines, the group of German speaking immigrants who would become the Pa Dutch upon arriving in Pennsylvania, as they actually had a bit of a layover in England and Ireland for some time before moving on to the 13 colonies. They had a reputation for penny-pinching and being poor, something which carried over to the Pa Dutch themselves, hence the idioms)

A highly unlikely story of language revitalization of a Native American language coming at you next week

That makes so much more sense! I definitely want to know more about how that works now. I'm a native english speaker and kind of dyslexic and I can't tell you how many times I've read english sentences like the one you wrote and thought, what the hell is going on here?

There's the saying that German words are the same length as English words, but German just uses fewer spaces. Selbstverständlich ist die Mehrheit der deutschen Wörter nicht so lang.