DANISH AN ELEMENTARY GRAMMAR AND READER[SSSAGASSASGGASSSSSSSSGasSssaagg! DANISH An Elementary Grammar and Reader aaa BY ELIAS BREDSDORFF, MA. Lecturer in Danish in the University of Cambridge BUBTGASASSSSSAaSaaaaaa’ CAMBRIDGE AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 1958 SAGAGTT GSAT SSSGGTS SSS SASS AAasssssSsSGesassssssssag BEERTESEESEESEEEEEES! SASSGGSSESSGSSSSASSSSossssaaaasa294439 - PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION ‘The majority of Danish grammars and readers are at tourist level, and they are unsatisfactory for the serious student of Danish. During my nine years as a University Lecturer in Danish in this country I have felt increasingly the need of a satisfactory Introduction to Danish. This book; theréfore, has been written to fill that gap. It is largely based on my own experience in teaching Danish to British students, and most of its contents Rave been ‘tried out’ on my studentsin London and Cambridge, the majority of whom had had no previous knowledge of the Danish language. The book has been divided into six parts: a general introduction to the written and the spoken language; a chapter on Danish phonetics; a grammar, including exer- cises; a chapter of general information; a chapter consisting of altogether twenty-five Danish texts, of which twenty are prose and five are poems; and a final chapter of twenty English texts for translation into Danish. The prose extracts are arranged according to their relative difficulty, but it has been my purpose at the same time to choose texts which are interesting and valuable in themselves. Ex- perience has taught me how irritating it is, for the students as well as for the teacher, to have boring and stupid texts, or texts which might be suitable for children but have little interest or appeal to adult readers. Of the twenty English texts for Danish composition, the first ten are relatively easy, with Danish translation of the most difficult words and phrases; the last ten have been borrowed from v