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Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

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Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#141

Post by zilti »

Symbiote wrote: post #63
sakjur wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the right to left should be left to right in that last sentence? I was briefly confused by that and ended up reading your links (takk!) Danish still use a somewhat complex infix system for reading numbers (five and half fours is 75), and I find that very confusing as a Swede who didn’t grow up with it.

Danish people no longer say the "times twenty" parts of their numbers, which makes it more confusing to foreigners. 75 femoghalvfjerds used to be spoken as femoghalffjerdsindstyve , fem og half-fjerd-sinds-tyve ¹, five and half-fourth-times-twenty. The longer form is still used for ordinal numbers. 75th is femoghalffjerdsindstyvende . French speakers will also recognise this system for numbers 80-99. 85 is quatre-vin…

I don't get the 75. How does it work? What is a half fourth time?

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#142

Post by zilti »

hurtigare wrote: post #87
berkes wrote: post #72

> Danish pronunciation sounds extremely «blurred» in Norwegian (and Swedish) ears. It does to Dutch ears too. Just a few weeks ago, I passed through some tourist-infested area in Amsterdam. "Are these Swedish tourists drunk at this hour in morning already? Oh, wait, they are sober Danes."

As a Swede I always thought you would relate to Danish more since both Danish and Dutch sounds "blurry" to us.

Does it? Now I wonder what Alemannic (Swiss-German, maybe especially the heavier dialects like Bernese and Walliserdeutsch) sound to you, because to my Bernese ears, Dutch sounds a lot closer to my own language than pretty much all other germanic languages.

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#143

Post by Symbiote »

zilti wrote: post #141
Symbiote wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Danish people no longer say the "times twenty" parts of their numbers, which makes it more confusing to foreigners. 75 femoghalvfjerds used to be spoken as femoghalffjerdsindstyve , fem og half-fjerd-sinds-tyve ¹, five and half-fourth-times-twenty. The longer form is still used for ordinal numbers. 75th is femoghalffjerdsindstyvende . French speakers will also recognise this system for numbers 80-99. 85 is quatre-vin…

I don't get the 75. How does it work? What is a half fourth time?

Sorry, I should have explained that better.

It's half of the fourth twenty — meaning all of the first, second and third twenties, but only half of the fourth one. 20 + 20 + 20 + ½×20 = 70.

And for the 75, it's just "five and" before all that.

Many native Danish speakers learn the abbreviated words as young children, and don't generally think about their numbers this way, if they're even aware of it. (Much as a native English speaker might not think of 'thirteen' as 'three-ten'.)

For 60 and 80, the normal, abbreviated form is very short: "tres" and "firs" (full form: "tresindstyve", "firsindstyve"). For foreigners, these sound rather like something to do with three and four — as they are! — which causes much more difficulty than expected when learning basic numbers.

("Much more difficulty than expected" is the general experience when learning Danish as a second language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI5DPt3Ge_s)

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#144

Post by samus »

goblin89 wrote: post #13

The status of Norwegian Nynorsk is reminiscent of Yue/Cantonese. In areas where it is native, it’s used in writing more rarely (and very rarely in official writing) compared to Mandarin (a distinct, not mutually intelligible language) or English. Another similarity is that Cantonese, like Nynorsk, is considered higher status where it’s spoken, and like Nynorsk it’s under somewhat of a threat so the communities know t…

The comparison is a bit flawed since there is no dialect continuum between spoken Mandarin and Cantonese, and there might have never been one.

A crucial difference is that there is no standardized form of written Cantonese. There is a common set of characters used in advertising, sometimes newspapers, or in court transcripts, but that's it. For anything official, Modern Standard Written Chinese is used.

People write Cantonese in private of course, but that usage is not uniform at all since there is a lot of slang (especially swearing words) for which more than one popular way to write it down exists. Quite often the characters chosen for that purpose had different meanings originally. Some particularly novel or distinctive words and idioms are even partly written in Latin letters, like 快-D.

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#145

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

hhjinks wrote: post #123
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The failed samnorsk reform did have a silver lining. Around high school I figured out that because of it, a shocking amount of Nynorsk grammar was secretly optional and the Bokmål version was very often valid Nynorsk. So I started just writing my essays in Bokmål and then fixing the errors in post, so to speak. Initially my teacher tried to fail me for this, but she lost that battle. I vehemently hate Nynorsk, or at…

That's small time. Back in my day, like 15 years ago, there was an on-machine bokmål to nynorsk translation program, named Nyno31, if I remember correctly. It wasn't great, but it would secure you a C with zero effort. Teachers weren't in the know, so there was almost no risk of getting caught.

Wow, I had no idea about that.

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#146

Post by boxed »

samus wrote: post #132
boxed wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But... there is no such extra rules in Japanese. The grouping does NOT count as it is absolutely vital to make it possible to say numbers at all.

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#147

Post by boxed »

samus wrote: post #136
downsplat wrote: post #117

Earlier 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 .

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.

Twenty is special. That destroys the entire 20-29 series.

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#148

Post by boxed »

karl-j wrote: post #111
boxed wrote: post #49

Earlier 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…

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.

Maybe. But English isn't so cleanly fixable.

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#149

Post by ChainOfFools »

Tor3 wrote: post #55
boxed wrote: post #49

Earlier 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…

For some reason many languages use an irregular system for numbers. Well, reasons are historical.. things may have made more sense in (e.g.) Old Norse than modern Danish, for example. Japanese though.. now that's regular. One, two, three, .. nine, ten, ten-one, ten-two,.. ten-eight, ten-nine, two-ten, two-ten-one.. and so on. And then 'hundred', and continue the same way. to-hundred-to-ten-five (225). The only stumbl…

Japanese does have two different words for seven though. なな for everything that is not related to telling time, and しち when you're referring to units of time.

But this is a welcome trade for the regularity and simplicity of the rest of the number system. Although the flexibility available in European languages as described elsewhere in this thread does allow for texturizing things in a poetic or evocative way. being able to get two or three jobs done with one set of words is sometimes nice even if it does make things complicated when all you want is the most common usage of those words.

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#150

Post by Tistron »

Symbiote wrote: post #143
zilti wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the 75. How does it work? What is a half fourth time?

Sorry, I should have explained that better. It's half of the fourth twenty — meaning all of the first, second and third twenties, but only half of the fourth one. 20 + 20 + 20 + ½×20 = 70. And for the 75, it's just "five and" before all that. Many native Danish speakers learn the abbreviated words as young children, and don't generally think about their numbers this way, if they're even aware of it. (Much as a native…

I think of it slightly differently, but it's basically the same:

In many germanic languages we say half-four when the time is half past three, where brits these days sometimes say half-three, to make it maximally confusing. I.e. we have an implied "half [to]" and they "half [past]". This way of counting is what the Danes do. "Half-four times twenty" is "a half before four, times twenty" is "3.5 x 20" is 70 is "halvfjerdsindtyve" is "halvfjerds".

But it is only confusing to think of it that way, to speak Danish you have to just learn it as an opaque pointer to 70, or you'll get stuck doing mental arithmetic every time they say a number.

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