In article ,
Martin writes:
| On Tue, 5 Feb 2008 09:21:22 +0100, "JennyC" wrote:
| "johannes" wrote
| The Danes that I have worked with in Holland could guess Dutch to a
| certain
| extent and learnt it quickly.
|
| The only reason for this is that the Danes learn foreign languages in
| school
| by necessity of being a small country; English, German, French at least.
| Dutch is as far away from Danish as German. The Danish language belongs to
| the Scandinavian family of languages.
|
| The Dutch learn English, French and German at school too and are also pretty
| quick at picking up other languages.....
|
| Dutch and German are indeed similar and Danish has a completely different
| ring to it :!)
|
| It sounds different, but has similar roots.

To use a gardening analogy, if we consider languages as angiosperms,
Dutch and Danish might be Pyrus communis and Chaenomeles japonica.
One's a tree and the other a shrub, but they are closely related.

English, of course, is an inter-generic hybrid :-)


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.