Asked on Reddit: Which of Rust, D, Go, Nim, and Crystal is the strongest and why?

via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Fri Jun 12 06:51:53 PDT 2015


On Friday, 12 June 2015 at 13:05:36 UTC, Chris wrote:
> Do you speak Bokmål or Nynorsk?

Bokmål, but neither Bokmål or Nynorsk are naturally spoken 
languages, they are written languages.

Nobody actually speaks Nynorsk (only in poetry, drama and movies 
where it is read in a rather literal way), it is a synthetic 
language, but it is quite close to some dialects (and I sometimes 
flip over when talking to people who are close to it). Nynorsk 
came about as part of the national romantic movement, an attempt 
to find the "true norwegian language". Then again Bokmål (which I 
do speak) is also a "synthetic" language that came about as 
"mispronounced" Danish (which was the formal official language 
for a long time). Kind of like Danish spoken letter-by-letter 
thus getting more clear consonants than in a natural language. 
Some decades ago they decided to create a new united languages 
that basically was a new synthetic bastardized language that 
nobody wanted to speak, and they gave up on it. In the districts 
Bokmål is more natural and "rounded" than here in Oslo though and 
some dialects sounds like a natural mix and it wouldn't make much 
sense to say they speak Bokmål or Nynorsk. I believe pure Bokmål 
as a spoken language was more of an upper class thing and is 
called Riksmål (Bokmål that tends towards archaic forms)

The funny thing is that Danish and Bokmål almost reads the same, 
but sounds completely different and some words even have opposite 
meanings ("grine" means to laugh in Danish, but to cry in 
Norwegian). Norwegians sometimes joke that in order to get a Dane 
to understand what you are saying you have get really drunk and 
mumble, then they will understand you perfectly! Or maybe it is 
just factual and based on experience? Alcohol is cheaper in 
Denmark…

> Here's a nice piece about "Language Mavens". They are quite 
> common in every country, and invariably they don't have a clue 
> about how languages and the human mind work:
>
> http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~sih01001/english/fall2007/TheLanguageMavens.pdf

Looks very interesting, I have to give that a closer look later.


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