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Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

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Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#111

Post by karl-j »

boxed wrote: post #49
vages wrote: post #10

Norwegian written and pronounced language was actually changed because one digit was added to phone numbers. Here is the long story: Starting after World War Two, the government made an attempt at _merging_ the two written languages. The imagined outcome was named “Samnorsk” (unified Norwegian), led by Språknemnda (The Language committee). The work mainly consisted of changing the grammar of certain words in the bokm…

I wish for a bigger revolution in Swedish. It has been rather painful to experience how hard it is for my children to learn to do simple addition in their heads because the language is broken. It's easier to add 30 and 40 in your head for children, than it is to add 13 and 2! Because it's "3 ten and 4 ten" vs " and 2". The special word being "thirteen". The language is irregular for numbers up to 29 as 20 has a speci…

English has the exact same problems as you’re mentioning, and an explanation using the English words would be much more relatable to readers of HN.

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#112

Post by furiens »

jhellan wrote: post #52
furiens wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s anything to do with case, just that the gender of the word is different between the dialects. ‘en’ or ‘a’ is just a suffix meaning ‘the’.

It is certainly possible that a word may differ in gender between dialects. But the way dative is normally expressed in Norwegian dialects is that masculine words get the normal feminine ending and feminine words get the masculine one.

Oh right, I didn’t know that! I still don’t imagine that’s what is happening in this case; there are just plenty more feminine nouns in Nynorsk and similar dialects.

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#113

Post by actionfromafar »

Tor3 wrote: post #106
perlgeek wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, as a foreigner, if you want to learn "the language", you have to start with something . Since the majority speak some dialect of bokmål, and most courses teach it, that's what you end up with. I watch some series in Norwegian, e.g. Ragnarok. I understood most of it, though some of the dialects were kinda hard to understand. But it seems a moot point, basically nobody in any language speaks the "high" language,…

Again, it's not a dialect of bokmål. That would sound like bokmål is actually a spoken language and there are dialects of it. It is not. It's the other way around - bokmål is an attempt to create a written language with common elements for a lot of people, and the same was done for nynorsk - it's just that for bokmål the selection was more from certain city areas in the south, and nynorsk more from dialects elsewhere…

I think the fact that Norway has two standardised written forms makes you think a lot more about the discrepancy between written and spoken language.

English, say, also has many spoken forms but more or less one written form.

If you learn written English and then move to the Highlands or Australia you are also in for some heavy learning.

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#114

Post by actionfromafar »

Tor3 wrote: post #98
TrackerFF wrote: post #82

Norwegian here. Nynorsk, or "New Norwegian", is really just used by a people on the south-western part of Norway. Other than that, it is merely a formality. You'll have to take the obligatory classes in Jr. HS and HS, but that's it for most people. A certain percentage of texts published by state agencies have to be in Nynorsk. The vast majority of Norwegians will never use it. We also have two other languages used h…

Small nitpick: Sámi people aren't more indigenous to Norway than just about anyone else, it's just that the various people tended to live in slightly different places. Norway's always been a place where people came from everywhere as soon as the ice started to retreat. Though of course the ancestors of people today, anyone and everyone, aren't really those who arrived 11k-12k years ago. As for Nynorsk - it was more c…

Well, the Sami arrived at the scene quite some time before the Norse though.

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#115

Post by The_Colonel »

ithkuil wrote: post #22
The_Colonel wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This was architected by the head of the telephone bureau in 1949, as an error reduction mechanism I find it fascinating that the telephone bureau was powerful enough to initiate such language change. Imagine happening this today. But this reminds me of the fact that in Czech we have both counting systems as well. The forward (english) counting is the standard, but the backward (german) is quite commonly used inform…

Some structural similarities can be explained by contact but other similarities are indications of common origin. Indeed both Germanic languages and Slavic languages share a common ancestor: proto-indo-european. "Present" also shares a similar etymology; from latin: prae (before) + esse (be), with a similar palette of meanings as the Germanic and Slavic forms

The similarities I have in mind are specific to German - Czech/Slavic. Like I don't know the English equivalent to "vorstellen" which would encompass all its meanings the same way as the Czech equivalent does. (though it is possible there is some archaic form which fell out of use)

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#116

Post by vintermann »

bigpeopleareold wrote: post #36
ksimukka wrote: post #14

As a student of Bokmål (for immigration and integration), Nynorsk is an ongoing mystery to me. I think that I'm still at the A level (A1/A2). My auditory processing disorder adds an extra variable that I'm still learning how to work with as an adult. If anyone (in Norway) knows of someone who has or is interested in APD ( https://www.statped.no/horsel/andre-utfordringer/auditive-pr... ), please reach out to me. Anywa…

A fun and relevant challenge would be to read some works by Jon Fosse, who was the recent Nobel Prize winner. He writes in Nynorsk. It's just different at a reading level (writing it is different, since there are some different grammar rules with it.)

For an easier challenge, there's the comic artist Jens K. Styve, who makes a newspaper comic ("Dunce") good enough that even the national newspapers didn't mind that it was in Nynorsk.

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#117

Post by downsplat »

boxed wrote: post #49
vages wrote: post #10

Norwegian written and pronounced language was actually changed because one digit was added to phone numbers. Here is the long story: Starting after World War Two, the government made an attempt at _merging_ the two written languages. The imagined outcome was named “Samnorsk” (unified Norwegian), led by Språknemnda (The Language committee). The work mainly consisted of changing the grammar of certain words in the bokm…

I wish for a bigger revolution in Swedish. It has been rather painful to experience how hard it is for my children to learn to do simple addition in their heads because the language is broken. It's easier to add 30 and 40 in your head for children, than it is to add 13 and 2! Because it's "3 ten and 4 ten" vs " and 2". The special word being "thirteen". The language is irregular for numbers up to 29 as 20 has a speci…

That's more or less how it works in English too... is it really that bad? Spanish and French also have special words for the teens, it's quite common in Europe and I've never heard of it being that difficult to learn.

Some languages have it much worse... I think Hindi is pretty irregular up to 100 .

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#118

Post by unixhero »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #109
unixhero wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nynorsk kept me away from becoming a fighter pilot

That makes me so angry. The Norwegian school system is so, so inflexible and it ruins many lives each year. For me, the reason I was never allowed to set foot in a university was German, PE, and Norwegian literature. I was suffering from severe health issues and I didn't have the energy to do all the subjects I had no interest in. So I poured my focus into the subjects I enjoyed and/or were relevant to my future plan…

You could always apply for a programme Bsc and or Msc in Biology at a university in Australia. There are even agents throughout Europe who set you up with a proper application and assist in this. They get a kickback when you are admitted.

Hard sciences degrees were really hard to get into in Norway too. Some times the best way to win is by not playing their game.

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#119

Post by vintermann »

actionfromafar wrote: post #114
Tor3 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small nitpick: Sámi people aren't more indigenous to Norway than just about anyone else, it's just that the various people tended to live in slightly different places. Norway's always been a place where people came from everywhere as soon as the ice started to retreat. Though of course the ancestors of people today, anyone and everyone, aren't really those who arrived 11k-12k years ago. As for Nynorsk - it was more c…

Well, the Sami arrived at the scene quite some time before the Norse though.

Maybe opening a can of worms here, but no... actually they/we didn't.

19th century scholars were happy to declare that the Sami were the original inhabitants of the north, but that had more with the fact that they preferred seeing themselves as the superior, colonizing culture, than with archeological and linguistic evidence. Being a native was not cool at all. It was awkward for these scholars to become gradually aware of Sami's relationship to Hungarian and languages from further east, and even more such things as the -anger names core Sami areas Porsanger, Varanger, Malangen etc.

Angr is a proto-Nordic word that means bay. -Angr names are common all over Norway. We know that the word went out of use before 800 though, because around that time Icleand got settled, and there are no -angr names in Iceland.

There are even proto-Norse words preserved in Sami place names such as Máhkarávju - Avju is a proto-Nordic/proto-Germanic word for island. Máhkarávju is quite clearly related to the modern Norwegian name for the island, Magerøya, but that means they must have borrowed the name more than thousand years ago.

It may seem that the many proto-Norse borrowings in Sami may come from that in at least some parts of the country some of the time, it wasn't Norse culture and language that supplanted the Sami, but vice versa! Very awkward for scholars who would rather stake their nationalistic claims on manifest destiny than being first.

Now, Sami activists say any of this doesn't matter, because the Sami were a minority people with their own established culture and languages who were around when the formal borders of Norway were drawn up (as late as 1750 in Finnmark). And that's the ILO 169 definition.

This is completely true. It's also true that Sami activists were actively involved in writing that definition so that it would include them. I totally respect why they did that piece of lobbying work - the Sami certainly have legitimate interest to defend, and for that purpose being classed with native Americans is much more useful than to be seen as just another quarrelsome European linguistic minority like Welsh, Basque or Catalan people - or, say, people who use Nynorsk! (just see the hate they get in this very thread).

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#120

Post by Tor3 »

actionfromafar wrote: post #114
Tor3 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small nitpick: Sámi people aren't more indigenous to Norway than just about anyone else, it's just that the various people tended to live in slightly different places. Norway's always been a place where people came from everywhere as soon as the ice started to retreat. Though of course the ancestors of people today, anyone and everyone, aren't really those who arrived 11k-12k years ago. As for Nynorsk - it was more c…

Well, the Sami arrived at the scene quite some time before the Norse though.

As vintermann said - there's no evidence for any group arriving earlier than any others. We know that the "Norwegian" population in modern Norway are a mix of the original European population and the Yamnaya and others, we don't know exactly when that population overtook the earlier one (what's certain is that people who lived along certain parts of the coast 11k-12k years ago didn't have any Yamnaya connection, obviously). We don't really know much, except that the Sami languages haven't diverged enough from related languages elsewhere for them to have been there that long ago. The Sami came much later than the post-glacial original population. When the ancestors of modern Norwegian and Sami groups (and others) arrived we simply don't know for certain. If you look at the very oldest writings you'll find that there were a great many different groups of people in Norway, including in the far north-east, and there was trade. That lasted all the way up to the arrival of Christianity, after that this (if related, or just a coincidence) became more of a "take, don't trade" business.
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