Which one should I support in my (automatically translated) SaaS?
This is answered by the page. “Bokmål is dominant in the rest of the country, and is used in writing by close to 90 %”
Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk
131–140 of 163 posts
Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think every natural language is irregular when it comes to numbers. And about Japanese: you forgot about counters for men, animals, flat things and so on. You have ichi-ippiku-ippon-hitory - issai And absolutely fascinating "system" for "years old" - everything starts with -sai but 20 years is "hatachi"!
> I think every natural language is irregular when it comes to numbers. But.. it's not. Japanese is not. Just because it's not metric with grouping doesn't mean it's irregular.
Not being decimal is not the issue. The irregularity are special rules for certain numbers or ranges of numbers for which another pattern has to be used.
Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk
#133Norwegian 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…
> 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…
> My favorite demonstration of this is the verb "vorstellen"
What makes you think this is an example of an infuence of German over Czech, rather than a common verb construction mechanism across indo-european languages?
Russian (and probably other slavic languages) has представить, which is virtually the same but in cyrillic, French/English has introduire/introduce (from latin intro [into] and ducere [drive, lead]), etc.
Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
Представить has the same meaning & construction in Russian, and I don't see why it would have been introduced through German.
Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk
#135[deleted]
Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 .
English has special words until twelve. Until nineteen it follows a pattern. The few exceptions to that pattern also apply to the multiples of ten. twelve-twenty, thirteen-thirty, fifteen-fifty, and that's it. It could be much, much worse.
Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 .
In Spanish, just 11 to 15.
In Greek only 11 and 12 are different, with 12 (δώδεκα = dodeka) being obvious to anyone who learned geometry.
Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk
#138Google Translate does not seem to differentiate between these, giving only an option for "Norwegian", so I have been a bit perplexed about what to put there. Thanks for this explanatory article.
Even Google search is pretty bad, as they don't have synonyms for the norwegian language when doing search. For example Høyskole -> Høgskule, Barneskole -> Barneskule (high school, elementary school)
These exact same words results in completely different search results. It so annoying when you trying to find something, you have to search multiple times. This is also relevant for many other languages. I absolutely belive you if spend some time implementing a smart synonyms-mapper, you could absolutely take web search 5 steps forward.
Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk
#139Earlier 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…
> My favorite demonstration of this is the verb "vorstellen" What makes you think this is an example of an infuence of German over Czech, rather than a common verb construction mechanism across indo-european languages? Russian (and probably other slavic languages) has представить, which is virtually the same but in cyrillic, French/English has introduire/introduce (from latin intro [into] and ducere [drive, lead]), e…
In general, modern Czech owes a significant fraction of its vocabulary to a certain Josef Jungmann, who published a big thesaurus about 180 years ago and "borrowed" new words into the up-to-that-time somewhat archaic language. Sometimes directly so, especially from other Slavic languages, sometimes via a calque from German/Latin/French etc.
Thus, sloka (stanza) is from Sanskrit, vzduch (air) from Russian, okres (county/region) from Polish, zeměpis (geography) a calque from Ancient Greek, and duchapřítomný (quick-witted) a calque from German geistesgegenwärtig.
I am not sure if vorstellen / představit is his calque as well.
Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
the problem with the english equivalent is that while "present" does originate ultimately from latin, it came there through a very tortuous path so it lost a lot of meanings along the way.