# Danish: Stød in dictionaries



## clevermizo

Hello Nordic Languages forum!

I have a question about _stød_. I have read some previous threads but it seems my question has not yet been addressed.

What does a native Danish speaker do if they are reading and they encounter a word in Danish they do not know or have never seen before? How would they know whether or not to pronounce a stød in the word? 

If they then decided they wanted to know what said unknown word means and looked it up in a monolingual Danish dictionary, would this dictionary have some way of encoding or identifying in pronunciation whether or not the word has stød in it?

Just curious because it doesn't seem like this phonological feature is encoded or predictable at all in the spelling (although I've heard that it is predictable if you know etymology and relation to cognate tones in Swedish, etc.). 

Thanks for indulging me!


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## hanne

I'd say mostly intuition (for me, anyway). It's a pretty much like deciding which syllable has stress in a word.

I just picked out Nudansk Ordbog (that's the standard dictionary for anything slightly beyond spelling), and checked the legend. I can see they have a symbol for stød (along with one for stress and one for long vowels, and that's all), but I've never noticed it before. Then again, I don't remember when was the last time I checked the dictionary for pronunciation - not sure I ever did.


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## Wilma_Sweden

Sadly, Nudansk Ordbok is not free of charge online. The ODS, however, is. It is probably a bit obsolete in some respects, but it does seem to indicate stød and accents with special characters. 

As Hanne says, native speakers largely rely on intuition. For native speakers of any language, this intuition gets very reliable. 

I'd be interested to know how stød relates to cognate tones in Swedish. To me, the stød is but one of several obstacles on the path to understanding spoken Danish... Any help is appreciated!


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## Alxmrphi

Non Danish speaker here, but I'm curious!
Can anyone tell me exactly what* stød *is please?


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## clevermizo

Wilma_Sweden said:


> I'd be interested to know how stød relates to cognate tones in Swedish. To me, the stød is but one of several obstacles on the path to understanding spoken Danish... Any help is appreciated!



Well I think Swedish has two tones (grave and acute?) in stressed syllables, am I right? Apparently where the equivalent word in Swedish has one of those tones, it's a stød for the same word in Danish. Anyway, it's just something a friend mentioned to me over conversation and I don't know which tone is referred to or the exact relationship. Apparently however, the stød is the Danish equivalent of the Swedish pitch tones. I'm sure there are others more knowledgeable on this forum who can answer this.

Just from the wikis on Swedish and Danish phonology here's a cognate if it helps: _ånden _Danish means "the spirit" and has stød, and the same word _anden_ in Swedish has the grave/Double Tone pitch accent. Maybe that's what the correspondence is?


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## hanne

Wilma, like clevermizo, I seem to remember that stød corresponds to one of the two tones - I'm pretty sure I picked that up from wikipedia somewhere, so a bit of browsing around might locate it. Otherwise I'll try and dig it out tomorrow.

I wasn't referring to Nudansk as a reference for further searching, just to mention what's available in a common dictionary used by the average Dane.

Alex, "exactly" is a very specific thing to ask for - I'm not even sure I can explain what it "roughly" is . But I know wikipedia has an article on it...


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## TheGist

Alxmrphi said:


> Can anyone tell me exactly what* stød *is please?


Danish stød is often compared to the German glottal stop in terms of pronunciation (if that helps  ) It helps me anyway because I'm familiar with German phonology and I worked a lot on my German pronunciation. So for now, I use a glottal stop in place of a stød whenever I speak Danish (or try to speak) and hope that one day I will find out what it is exactly. 


Wilma_Sweden said:


> Sadly, Nudansk Ordbok is not free of charge online. The ODS, however, is.


Many thanks for the link! I've been looking for a long time for an online dictionary that offers good transcription of Danish words.


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## hanne

TheGist said:


> Many thanks for the link! I've been looking for a long time for an online dictionary that offers good transcription of Danish words.


That's a historical dictionary though, from 1700 to ~1950. For practical use you'd probably want http://ordnet.dk/ddo/ instead.

Wilma, this is the wikipedia article I was talking about:


> Stødet optræder således stort set kun i ord, hvor man på svensk og norsk har akut eller "accent 1", hvorimod de stødløse former i det store og hele svarer til svenske og norske ord med gravis eller "accent 2". F.eks. dansk ånd’en ~ ånden, svensk a´nden ~ a`nden.


(and it's the same example that clevermizo gave, so I guess the source is identical too )


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## Wilma_Sweden

hanne said:


> That's a historical dictionary though, from 1700 to ~1950. For practical use you'd probably want http://ordnet.dk/ddo/ instead.
> 
> Wilma, this is the wikipedia article I was talking about:
> 
> (and it's the same example that clevermizo gave, so I guess the source is identical too )


I think clevermizo got the accents mixed up, but never mind, I get the idea and I'll read the article properly.

Thanks for the link to Den Danske Ordbog - I've been looking for it, but couldn't find it! I'll add it to the Danish resource sticky later.


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