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Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

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Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#51

Post by Tor3 »

Sesse__ wrote: post #45
NorwegianDude wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't speak nynorsk or bokmål. It's s written language. Some dialects are closer to one written form than the other.

There is a tiny minority of people who insist on speaking nynorsk exactly as it is written, usually in an archaic style like the 1917 normal. Ironically, these people tend to live in Oslo or surrounding areas, where the dialect is far and wide away from nynorsk. It is e.g. pretty much the only group of people that use the “Noreg” form in actual speech. (Bokmål, and nearly all Norwegian dialects, use “Norge” for the c…

As for the "exactly as written".. I had a teacher like that, in middle school. He was from the north but did not speak his real dialect, instead he transformed his natural speech into as close to spoken "nynorsk" as he could. He was my teacher in the "Norwegian" class, and the only thing we did in that class was to write in Nynorsk. That was all. We had two sets of notebooks each, we had to write essays in Nynorsk twice a week (thus two notebooks so that we could alternate). Until then I had never had any particular animosity against Nynorsk, but I truly learned to hate it through and through. From him. Only now, untold decades later, have I learned to love it. Reading a book by Jon Fosse (the recent Noble prize winner) right now. In fact what I really like is reading the very old, original form as Aasen created it and Vinje wrote it.

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#52

Post by jhellan »

furiens wrote: post #29
jhellan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow! You have preserved the dative case. "i kerken" instead of "i kerka". Dative is AFAIK not part of any standard Scandinavian language, but remains in some dialects. Steadily losing ground, though.

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.

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#53

Post by goblin89 »

bjornevik wrote: post #37
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…

> Nynorsk, is considered higher status where it’s spoken Neither nynorsk or bokmål are spoken languages.

Nynorsk is, according to TFA, predominantly used in speech and less used in writing, while Bokmål is the opposite. (Minus region specifics.) Is that not correct?

My impression, only based on this article, is that Nynorsk and Bokmål are both spoken as well as written, just more or less so depending on context and region. Just as English is both a written and a spoken language, and Cantonese is both a written and a spoken language.

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#54

Post by dotancohen »

The_Colonel wrote: post #16
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…

> 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…

  > I find it fascinating that the telephone bureau was powerful enough to initiate such language change. Imagine happening this today.
A modern analogue might be to straighten out all the dual meanings and complicated grammar of modern English, in order for machine learning systems to more reliably parse spoken or written language.

The thought is terrifying.

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#55

Post by Tor3 »

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…

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 stumble is when you pass 10000, as from then on the grouping is in tens of thousands, not in thousands. But with that the only issue there's only one struggle to master (for learners coming from a culture which groups in thousands).

Anecdotally, Japanese children learn to do arithmetic quicker than children from (e.g.) Sweden. But I've been unable to find real scientific confirmation of this.

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#56

Post by matsemann »

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…

My Danish grandpa used to mock our Norwegian numbers (who is he to speak, with the Danish number system being completely wack, heh), by saying toti-en, toti-to etc as 21, 22, because he found it funny that we had a different word for 20 than for the other tens.

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#57

Post by Tor3 »

goblin89 wrote: post #53
bjornevik wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nynorsk, is considered higher status where it’s spoken Neither nynorsk or bokmål are spoken languages.

Nynorsk is, according to TFA, predominantly used in speech and less used in writing, while Bokmål is the opposite. (Minus region specifics.) Is that not correct? My impression, only based on this article, is that Nynorsk and Bokmål are both spoken as well as written, just more or less so depending on context and region. Just as English is both a written and a spoken language, and Cantonese is both a written and a spo…

Nynorsk and Bokmål are both _written_ forms only. Norwegian spoken language is a huge continuum of dialects - there's no official spoken Norwegian (unlike e.g. Swedish, where something called "rikssvensk" was introduced by the authorities - "national spoken Swedish").

What you will find though is that there are a couple of scenarios where people will kind of speak the written form. One is, or at least used to be, newscasters on TV. They used to have rules which limited the kind of speech used, for reasons. And, as the news were essentially read from a script.. you speak it like it's written. Be that Bokmål or Nynorsk. And that's where you will find spoken Bokmål (or Nynorsk).. when reading aloud. And, as I mentioned in another comment.. when teaching people Norwegian. In the beginning you kind of speak the written form, otherwise the student would be totally confused.

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#58

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

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…

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 least the fact that it's supposed to be "equal" to bokmål. It was a neat idea and all, but I honestly think it should only be seen as an archaic language used for poetry and literature. And only taught to students who want to delve deeper into that, not forced onto you starting in 8th grade.

Re: Norwegian: Bokmål vs. Nynorsk

#59

Post by matsemann »

goblin89 wrote: post #53
bjornevik wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nynorsk, is considered higher status where it’s spoken Neither nynorsk or bokmål are spoken languages.

Nynorsk is, according to TFA, predominantly used in speech and less used in writing, while Bokmål is the opposite. (Minus region specifics.) Is that not correct? My impression, only based on this article, is that Nynorsk and Bokmål are both spoken as well as written, just more or less so depending on context and region. Just as English is both a written and a spoken language, and Cantonese is both a written and a spo…

I think you're misunderstanding a bit. Those are both written languages only, but some may speak closer to one than the other. My speaking would be pretty close to bokmål, as I have "no" dialect.

Nynorsk is a mix of lots of various spoken dialects. No one really "speaks" nynorsk, but for many it's closer to how they speak than bokmål would be, but it's still not 1:1 for them. The only way you really would "speak" nynorsk if you're reading a play or something written in it.

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