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Chap. XV.
THE DANISH LANGUAGE.
227
museums and the galleries, and, as his knowledge was
universal, I was very content with my bargain, and
without any hard labour acquired a considerable
knowledge of the language.
A six months’ trial convinces me that Danish is
not to be picked up so easily as French or German;
in the first place, in the society and shops, all the
world speak either English or the above-named
languages. The grammar is simple enough; but the
pronunciation most irritating. After reading aloud for
half an hour you feel a sensation in your mouth as
though you had been eating sloes. The Danish
language abounds with consonants, many of which are
never pronounced; the g and j are slurred over in a
most inaudible manner. The d, except at the
commencement of a word, is either never pronounced at all or as
th. The th, in the imperfect tense of the verbs, is most
disagreeable; for example, the word arbeidide (imperfect
of the verb arbeide, to work) is pronounced arbeithethe.
Why, it is as bad as the “ thirty thousand thistles ”
when four or five words of this genus come together.
W hen we had triumphantly mastered the auxiliary verbs,
my student proposed that we should conjugate the verb
To love. “ My good fellow,” I replied, “ twenty years
ago I would have done so with pleasure, but now it
would be perfectly useless to me; suppose we try
something more useful—let’s conjugate the verb To eat; and
so we did. It is impossible to go through your ABC
without being struck by the analogy of Danish with our
own native tongue, and more so still when you devote
yourself to the ballads and literature of the early
centuries ; and I am informed that the laws of King
Valdemar’s time have even more resemblance still;
Q 2
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