Archive for November, 2012
Naked Danes Posted by Bjørn A. Bojesen on Nov 30, 2012
If you want to know what makes a foreign culture different from your own, there’s nothing like a culture clash. This month, Danish and (corporate) American values clashed when Danish author Peter Øvig was banned from Apple’s online bookstore. Why? Because his recent books, Hippie 1 and Hippie 2, contain some photos of naked people. Sure, any forlag (publisher) has…
The War of the Words Posted by Bjørn A. Bojesen on Nov 23, 2012
Whoa, the new edition of Retskrivningsordbogen has arrived! The Dictionary of Correct Writing, as the title translates in English, is the Holy Grail of journalists, teachers and just about everyone who uses the Danish Language. Edited by Dansk Sprognævn – the Danish Language Council – it contains the official spellings of those ord (words) that are considered a part of the…
From Play to Playful Posted by Bjørn A. Bojesen on Nov 14, 2012
Sometimes you need to change a word from one grammatical class to another. In English you do that all the time, for example when you make the verb ”to read” into a noun by adding an -ing suffix: Reading makes me happy. When you want to swap the class of a Danish word, you have several…
How to know when the baker’s born… Posted by Bjørn A. Bojesen on Nov 11, 2012
A Swede enters a Danish taxa (cab) and asks the driver to take him to a rolig place. To the Swede’s bewilderment, the driver drops him off at a graveyard! The fun part of this joke is that the word rolig means ”amusing” in Swedish, but ”relaxed” or ”quiet” in Danish… A lot of Danish humor [HOO-more] is based on ordspil (puns, literally ”word plays”)…