Flat of the land
We’re not supposed to do them anymore, but if we were allowed to, anyone could do accents with this handy accents guide. Take space ghettos, for example. Say it out loud with an American lilt and suddenly you sound like a Scot describing their favourite 1990s girl band. Or emma chizit. Never met her, but a bit of a South African enquiry on price, perhaps? Or in Detroit. Now, doesn’t that have a touch of an Irish acknowledgment? But here’s a doozy: how do you pronounce Møn?
It’s the first question I ask when I meet Michael, and he should know. He works at the GeoCenter Møns Klint, whose logos adorn his jersey along with a picture of the chalk cliffs that make the island of Møn, in Denmark’s southern Baltic waters, so geologically important.
‘It’s like “moon”,’ he says, which when he says it does sound very much like when he is saying Møn, but when I say it, sounds very much like I am saying ‘moon’. I try more emphasis on the double-o and in my head sound like a Glaswegian cow.
It’s a funny old thing, language. That ø in Danish, a letter for which we have no better descriptor than ‘o with stroke’ or ‘slashed o’, makes a kind of er or ur sound, and it helps give Denmark an alphabet of 29 letters. Not quite in the realm of the world’s longest alphabet, Khmer, the written form of Cambodia’s national language which runs to a whopping 74 letters, but it is much longer than the world’s shortest, Rotokas, an indigenous language of Papua New Guinea – 12 letters.
This has nothing to do with cycling but riding into a block headwind gives the mind plenty of time to
