Sound Correspondence Between Swedish and Danish/Norwegian

Many Swedish words with the letter å, a letter that is pronounced similarly to the letter o in English, correspond to words with the letter a in Danish and Norwegian. The letter å is also used in Danish and Norwegian and also appears in identical words. The following list of ten words illustrates the pattern:

ålder alder (age)

då/da (then)

fångst/fangst (catch)

gång/gang (time)

lång/lang (long)

långsam/langsom (slow)

många/mange (many)

sång/sang (song)

stång/stang (pole)

tång/tang (seaweed)

In many cases, the letters a and å appear in identical words in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. Examples include far (father) and ål (eel). In the pair hand/hånd (hand), the Swedish word has a and the Danish/Norwegian word has å. The list provides ten words with different vowels, å in Swedish and a in Danish and Norwegian.

Schwa in Catalan

Unlike Romance languages such as Spanish and Italian, Catalan has a schwa. As in English, it occurs in unstressed vowels. The schwa is a common vowel of Catalan.

Words in which the Catalan schwa occurs are casa (house), home (man) and pare (father). The same words are casa, hombre and padre in Spanish. However, in Spanish, the word-final vowel of each word is not a schwa. In western dialects of Catalan, unstressed vowels are not reduced to a schwa, but the eastern dialects are the most widely spoken and include the largest city of Catalonia, Barcelona.

Catalan is a Romance language. One of the vowels of Catalan is the schwa, a vowel that does not occur in Spanish. The schwa in Catalan always occurs in unstressed syllables.

Identical Words in Finnish and Hungarian

Though Finnish and Hungarian are both Finno-Ugric languages, few words are identical in the two languages. The Finnish word mesi (honey) is méz in Hungarian, the Finnish me (we) is mi and veri (blood) is vér.  They are similar but nevertheless not identical. The following ten words are identical in the two languages:

algebra (algebra)

dilemma (dilemma)

energia (energy)

gorilla (gorilla)

internet (internet)

kamera (camera)

kenguru (kangaroo)

lista (list)

neon (neon)

paprika (paprika)

Though these words are identical, they are all loanwords. In fact, six of them are identical to English, and the other four are quite similar. The fact that it is a challenge to find identical words in Finnish and Hungarians indicates that the two languages are not so closely related to one another.