Introduction: Dead man talking -- Prologue to history -- Gemini, the twins: Faroese and Icelandic -- East is East: heralding the birth of Danish and Swedish -- The ties that bind: Finnish is visited by Swedish -- The black death comes for Norwegian: Danish makes a house call -- Faroese emerges -- Sámi, language of the far North: encounters with Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish -- Epilogue: the seven sisters now and in the future.

Provides a unique, up-to-date survey of twelve Germanic languages from English and German to Faroese and Yiddish.

The book is the most comprehensive account of the phonology of Danish ever published in any language. It gives a clear analysis of the sound patterns of modern Danish and examines the relations between its speech sounds and grammar. The author develops new models for the analysis of phonology and morphology-phonology interactions, and shows how these may be applied to Danish and to other languages. Danish has an unusually rich vowel system and exhibits radical reduction processes that make it difficult for foreigners to understand. The sound pattern is equally challenging for the analyst. Professor Basbøll develops a non-circular model for the sonority syllable and applies it to Danish phonotactics. He presents a radically new and insightful analysis of stød, a syllable accent which has a complex grammatical distribution and is unique among the world ́s languages. He also describes syllabic and word structures, and stress and intonation. The book is fully referenced and indexed. It will be widely welcomed by phonologists and scholars of Danish, and is likely to become the standard account of Danish phonology.

As its title states, this work formulates in language a sense of language, a sense of our involvement in speaking and listening, reading and writing. What it works out may be called the sense, only because it provides, or hopes to provide, an access to the myriad possibilities of language. In fact, if the four Chapters in any way "grind an axe", they do so with a view to decapitating the overweening contemporary tendency to hedge in language, to make some thing of a prison out of it ... for ourselves. The reader should bear in mind that the purport of the work lies in learning the sense of language, not in teaching it. I grant a book is utterly worthless unless something of importance can be learned from it, but I also believe a philosophical book can not and (even if it tries) does not teach anything. There are indeed good books which teach and exposit material for the reader, but they are peripheral to the reflective domain. In my career as a teacher of sorts, I have discovered how difficult works like Aristotle's Metaphysics suddenly make sense to students when they finally read them as manuals for learning, handbooks suggesting what the reader can examine in order to understand not the book primarily, but his own experience of and thought upon things. My own work here will, I hope, be taken as something of a handbook.

Beginner's Danish offers basic language instruction in the national language of Denmark, presenting grammar, vocabulary, and common phrases in clear, concise lessons. Perfect for both classroom and independent students, each of the 13 lessons opens with dialogues on topics such as greetings, family, athletics, dining, illness, holidays and celebrations. Following the dialogues are vocabulary lists, explanations of grammar, and exercises. Two audio CDs accompany the lessons, providing correct pronunciation of all the vocabulary and a selection of the dialogues, with pauses for repetition by the student. Also included are an exercise key, Danish-English and English-Danish glossaries, as well as an introduction to Danish history and culture.