How do you pronounce Gyllenhaal...

[Katie77]

Yeah......lets just completely change the topic ......

[fritzkep]

And another feature of the pronunciation that is quite different from English is that of the intonation. The stress is of course on the first syllable, but unlike in English, where the pitch of the voice rises on the stress and falls on the other syllables, in Swedish the pitch goes down for the stress then rises.

[CellarDweller]

^^^^^^

Whut?

[Sason]

And another feature of the pronunciation that is quite different from English is that of the intonation. The stress is of course on the first syllable, but unlike in English, where the pitch of the voice rises on the stress and falls on the other syllables, in Swedish the pitch goes down for the stress then rises.

Really? I didn't know that!

 

[CellarDweller]

Ok Miss smarty pants!

[Sason]

I wasn't trying to be funny, I really didn't know that. Meaning I've never heard it described before.

The laughing smiley was because it's funny to hear someone non-Swedish tell you interesting facts that you didn't know about your own language.

[fritzkep]

The lowering of pitch on a stressed syllable is also true of Russian. It's what gives Swedish what to English speakers sounds like a sing-song way of speaking. Even moreso in Norwegian, which actually uses pitch to differentiate between words.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_accent

For example in many East Norwegian dialects, the word "bønder" (farmers) is pronounced using tone 1, while "bønner" (beans or prayers) uses tone 2. Though the difference in spelling occasionally allows the words to be distinguished in written language, in most cases the minimal pairs are written alike. A Swedish example would be the word "tomten," which means "Santa Claus" (or "the house gnome") when pronounced using tone 2, and means "the plot of land," "the yard," or "the garden" when pronounced using tone 1. Thus, the sentence "Är det tomten på tomten?" ("Is that Santa Claus out in the yard?") uses both pronunciations right next to each other. Another example in Swedish is the word "anden", which means "the duck" when using tone 1 and "the spirit" when using tone 2. "Den heliga anden" could, in writing, be construed as either "the Holy Spirit" or "the holy duck", whereas in speech the pitch accent would convey the intended meaning.

[CellarDweller]

I wasn't trying to be funny, I really didn't know that. Meaning I've never heard it described before.

The laughing smiley was because it's funny to hear someone non-Swedish tell you interesting facts that you didn't know about your own language.

Fritz is a language guro

[fritzkep]

Languages are fun!

[CellarDweller]