If you’re wondering why I haven’t posted in a couple weeks, it’s because I have just returned from a trip to Copenhagen (København) and Amsterdam.
I speak roughly zero Danish and zero Dutch, but that was little problem, since the locals spoke better English than the inhabitants of most major American cities. In fact, while we were visiting, Denmark was celebrating the 200th birthday of Hans Christian Andersen, and the TV special, on Danish TV, was in English.
That said, it would have been nice to know how to pronounce the names of various sites, based on their spelling. Dutch actually isn’t too hard, if you speak a little German (j sounds like English y) and recognize a few simple patterns (ij sound like eye, etc.). Danish, on the other hand, makes little sense. As this online Danish pronunciation guide makes clear, Danish has some odd rules: d is “soft” (basically silent) after a vowel, and g is silent after a vowel or at the end of a word (that ends in -ig). So kedelig, which means boring, is pronounced a bit like curly.