Mildly random, but I keep coming across the construction âham/hende [XYZ]âenâ or âham/hende den [XYZ]â to refer to a person in spoken Danish. When and how would you use that? I mean, I think I get the basic idea, but Iâm super uncertain about using it myself because I donât know EVERY SINGLE DETAIL :P
This is actually a really good question that I also thought about a while ago when constructing my post on gender neutral pronouns in Danish!
The sentence that made me consider it was a demonstration of how to use the neopronoun høn whose nominative and oblique forms are identical. When going to translate it, I realised that there actually wasnât a great English equivalent.
What I wrote was:
Det er høn den høje med lyst hĂĽr, which I ended up translating as âTheyâre the tall one with light hairâ. But thatâs not very specific, so allow me to come up with some better examples! I am going to use glossing for this, which tumblrâs formatting unfortunately isnât great for, so I will be using screenshots with image descriptions.
For a starter, ham/hende [xyz]en and ham/hende den [xyz] are usually used when describing to a conversation partner a person or object that they may not be super familiar with. I.e. if I were to describe Keira Knightley to my dad I might describe her as the actor in Pirates of The Carribean; hende skuespilleren fra Pirates of the Carribean. Likewise, if I in the original example was pointing out a friend who uses høn pronouns (which is not a friend I have, but thatâs besides the point) in a crowd to another friend, who donât know them very well and therefore need physical pointers so identify them, I could say høn den høje etc.
As for when to use -en/-et vs. den/det, itâs the usual rules for adjectives. I cannot remember if Iâve ever made a post about that, but if I havenât I might look into it soon. Now for some more in-depth examples!
Letâs use ham/hende [xyz]en for simplicity. Since I already used that example, lets go with this sentence:
Du kender da Keira Knightley; hende skuespilleren fra Pirates of the Caribbean.
First I want to bring into focus the order and function of the phrases here. I apologise if my terminology is a little off, because I literally have never learned some of this in English.
[Image description: A screenshot of an analysis of the example sentence, designating âduâ as a noun phrase and the subject, âkenderâ as a verb phrase and the predicate, âdaâ as an adverbial phrase, âKeira Knightleyâ as a noun phrase and the direct object, and âhende skuespilleren et ceteraâ as a noun phrase and the object complement. End image description]
[Image description: Another screenshot, now with the a simpler sentence âdet er hende skuespilleren et ceteraâ. âDetâ is marked as a noun phrase and subject, âerâ as a verb phrase and predicate, and âhende skuespilleren et ceteraâ as a noun phrase and subject complement. End image description]
So what Iâm really trying to get at here is that ham/hende [xyz]en/den [xyz] has an attributive function and typically acts as a complement in a sentence. It may occur alone as a means of further elaborating something about a person or object if an interlocutor seems confused by mention of said person/object by name or the like.
Now, lets get to actually translating the above. You may remember that I said I âended up translatingâ the example I used in my pronouns post? Thatâs because there is no good translation. If I were to do a not very detailed glossing of it, it would look like this:
[Image description: A glossing of the example sentence according to the Leipzig glossing rules. Ultimately, the sentence is translated to âsurely you know Keira Knightley; the actor from Pirates of the Caribbeanâ. End Image description]
So, to put if it simply, directly translated word-by-word the sentence would end up as You know surely Keira Knightley; her the actor from Pirates of the Caribbean, which is not great â specifically because of the ham/hende [xyz]en/den [xyz] construction (if you ignore the adverb). Likewise, the simpler version would be That is her the actor from Pirates of the Caribbean.
So get this: For the sentence to look just fine in English, all you have to do is remove the pronoun (and fix the adverb, but again: not the point).
The thing that happens in the sentence here is called extraposition. It is, and I cannot stress this enough, EXTREMELY common in spoken Danish to the point where itâs almost mandatory. You could say a sentence without it, but literally no one ever does. While we write it with no problem, Danes are almost incapable of actually saying a sentence that has a 3rd person subject that is not a pronoun without adding an extraposition.
Normal straight-forward Danish word order without getting too much into it is subejct - verb - object, EXCEPT if the subject is 3rd person and not already a pronoun. Then it spoken Danish it almost always becomes extraposition - subject - verb - object.
This ultimately results in sentences like manden elsker hunden âthe man loves the dogâ and hundene spiser kød âthe dogs eat meatâ becoming manden han elsker hundene âthe man he loves the dogsâ and hundene de spiser kød âthe dogs they eat meatâ, moving the noun to the extraposition and positioning the pronoun in place of the subject.
This could also happen to a sentence like du kender da skuespilleren fra Pirates of the Caribbean âsurely you know the actor from Pirates of the Caribbeanâ, which would become du kender da ham/hende skuespilleren fra Pirates of the Caribbean âsurely you know him/her the actor from Pirates of the Caribbeanâ. So in this case, the nucleus of the NP skuespilleren âthe actorâ remains in its original position, but an oblique pronoun is added as a sort of extraposition (this is not entirely true, as thatâs not really how word order works, but it works as an explanation as to why this happens).
The opposite could also happen if the original sentence read (...) ham/hende fra Pirates of the Caribbean â(...) him/her from Pirates of the Caribbeanâ, with an extra skuespilleren âthe actor being addedâ.
Regardless of whether it is the pronoun or the noun that is added, the pronoun ALWAYS get the first position when it is not in the case of the subject.
I donât know why this is, since Iâve only ever really learned about moving a noun/pronoun to extraposition and add a pronoun as the subject. However, I suspect it has something to do with of ham/hende [noun] actually having an almost independent function i.e. very clearly as in a sentence like hende Eva, hun er ret sød âsay, that Eva, she is quite sweetâ, so ham/hende [noun] serves the same function as the English construction say, that [noun], especially the that [noun], in which the Danish equivalent uses the pronoun to add a certain amount of definite-ness to the noun. Ultimate, I actually think, that the most accurate translation if hende skuespilleren fra Pirates of the Caribbean would be âthat actor from Pirates of the Carribeanâ.
I donât really know, but I think itâs really interesting!
This is very long and I spent like an hour and a half writing it instead of doing my reading for tomorrow (oops), but I hope it helped. Feel free to ask any questions you might have!
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