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Archiver > GEN-MEDIEVAL > 1999-05 > 0928082294


From: Kelly Petit <>
Subject: Re: Inbreeding
Date: Sun, 30 May 1999 18:38:14 +0200


John Carmi Parsons wrote:
>
> On Sun, 30 May 1999, John Steele Gordon wrote:
>
> > Kelly Petit wrote:
> >> 'Konge' is the singular substantive
> >> ex: a king=en konge
> >> But if you put it in front of the name as a title:
> >> ex: king Christian IX=kong Christian den IX
> >> the indefinite plural is:konger
> >> the definite plural:kongene
> >> Simple, no?
>
> > No, it isn't. I have heard that Danish is a language that is a royal
> > horror for a foreigner to learn, and this would seem to indicate that
> > that is the case. Thank God for English, the "grammarless language."
>
> Amen to that. For years I assumed that Danish forms the feminine much like
> German, so that "queen" in Danish would be something like "kongennin" and so
> got badly thrown by "kongene" when I came across it. I don't know how long it
> took me to realize that "queen" in Danish is "dronning," which often appears in
> English (i.e., U.K.) works as "droning." So initially I assumed that "droning
> Luise," a reference to Christian IX's wife in a British life of Queen Mary (was
> it the Pope-Hennesey book?), was a comment on Luise's style of speaking....
>
> John Parsons

'Dronning' actually comes from 'Dróttin'/'drott', then later
'dróttning' the old Norrön version for a king's wife, which of course
does not have much in common with your 'droning'-:)

Kelly

Kelly-:)

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