Thank you. I use DjVu to read the Century Dictionary at
Jerry
-- Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get. ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
Sami is actually a group of half-dozen dialects which are so far from each other that Sami-speaking people may not understand speakers from a non-neighbour dialect.
Sami is a member of the Fenno-Ugrian language group. Looked from Finnish, Sami is somewhere between Estonian and Hungarian: I can catch some expressions but most of it is incomprehensible.
Bokmål / nynorsk?
-- -Tauno
Those are the two *written* forms of Norwegian: Bokm=E5l (litteraly "the language of/from the books") was based on the Danish written language established by the Danish government during the "400-year night", when Norway was a subsidiary to the Danish crown between ~1380 and 1814. The civil servants had all been trained in Denmark, and wrote Danish fluently, so the obvious thing to do was to keep business as usual.
Since then the 'official' written Norwegian language was dominated by the heritage from the Danish civil service. To this day, some 200 years later, it is very little difference between written Norwegian Bokm=E5l and written Danish. A non-native speaker of both the two languages would need to know what to look for, to see the difference.
However, bokm=E5l is strictly a written language. Some people *claim* to speak bokm=E5l, but in reality only speaks a normalized dialect that is the closest to the written language, but still far enough away that they are two different forms.
In the nationalromantic era that followed the 1814 emancipation from the Danes there was a movement to establish a home-grown Norwegian written language, to replace the heritage from the Danes.
The idea was to compensate for the Danish influence, represented by the civil service and the urban establishment, by basing the new written language on the rural spoken dialects. Unfortunately, there was an over-compensation, in that the person in charge, Ivar Aasen, went to the furthest, most remote valleys he could possibly reach with 1820-30s communications.
So he ended up doubly alienating his intended audience, partially by using the most obscure rural non-Danish forms he could possibly find; partially by restricting his data to the areas near the south-east central, leaving a lot of the more remote areas, particularly around the coast, uncatered for.
Lots of people who might have been positive to the efforts were alienated by this over-compensation, leaving the population in two entrenched camps, fiercly disagreeing with each other. After a lot of hubbub, this written language has now become what is known as "nynorsk", "New Norwegian".
Repercussions of the ancient battles are stil raging, as kids think nynorsk (which in these days is based on an average of the spoken Norwegian dialects) is "grautm=E5l", "porrage language", while they at the same time are battling with the not at all insignificant (well, all out irrational) quirks, twists and turns associated with making an artifical written language match up with their spoken languages.
As for myself, I speak a normalized (probably more so than I am aware) form of a northern dialect, that matches quite nicely with the present norm of nynorsk. (Not that it matters: I still write bokm=E5l, as does some 80-90% of the population.) My dialect is non-typical Norwegian in that the 'melody' (prosidy?) matches quite well with both English (well, at least compared to most Norwegian dialects).
Many years ago I stayed a few months in Italy, with another Norwegian who spoke one of the dominant Norwegian dialects. People who heard us talk among ourselfs could not understand how we could possibly be talking the same language. During that stay I learned that the melody/prosidy my non-normalized Norwegian dialect is particularly well matched up with the Italian langauge.
Rune
Hell..Finn is easy
Noh, moniko sinun sedistäsi on tehnyt itsemurhan tänä vuonna?
Piva!
Gunner
"Aren't cats Libertarian? They just want to be left alone. I think our dog is a Democrat, as he is always looking for a handout" Unknown Usnet Poster
Heh, heh, I'm pretty sure my dog is a liberal - he has no balls. Keyton
In most of that part of Europe it's BEER.
Not in Soumi.
Gunner
"Aren't cats Libertarian? They just want to be left alone. I think our dog is a Democrat, as he is always looking for a handout" Unknown Usnet Poster
Heh, heh, I'm pretty sure my dog is a liberal - he has no balls. Keyton
None - they have died of old age years ago, my father is the only one of five left.
If you're looking for beer, it looks like that in Slavic languages, but ours is olut (õlle in Estonian), obviously from the Scandinavian öl.
-- -Tauno
Thanks, Rune. I'm afraid that all the dialects sound like funny Swedish to me ...
-- -Tauno
Hi Rune, I know the word but I never really knew the exact meaning. Looked it up at
greetings Frank
PS don´t forget to Zünd the Umlaut!
For me as a german, who learned some Norwegian 18 years ago (and using it in regular vacations) and who currently learns Swedish, Swedish sounds like fuzzy Norwegian ;-)
Takk, det var veldig interessant.
Yes; I've noticed that people in northern Norway use words from Nynorsk (as far as I'm able to understand).
bye Andreas
-- Andreas Hünnebeck | email: acmh@gmx.de ----- privat ---- | www : http://www.huennebeck-online.de Fax/Anrufbeantworter: 0721/151-284301 GPG-Key: http://www.huennebeck-online.de/public_keys/andreas.asc PGP-Key: http://www.huennebeck-online.de/public_keys/pgp_andreas.asc
Lock: Flintlock mechanism. Stock: wooden holder to fit your shoulder. Barrel: tube which fires the bullet
It's not really common use, now that we've progressed past flintlocks.
-- Christopher A. Young Learn more about Jesus
Yikes! I'm 60 freakin' years old, and I swear, as Goddess is my witness, that this is the first time in my life I realized that this refers to a gun! All my life, I've assumed that it had something to do with shipping, meaning "a full load of cargo."
"Stock" - well, compare "stockroom", and "barrel", well, that's a container with staves, used for shipping all manner of stuff. The "Lock" part, I simply assumed was something I didn't know about, maybe the padlock on a treasure chest or something.
Thanks, Rich
You're 60 freakin' years old and still have opportunities to stretch those old brain cells!
I knew what it meant whenever I thought hard about it, but for the most part it's just another cliché rattling around in the old brain pan.
(We need _new_ metaphors to replace these old clichés that you have to be a historian to understand their meaning. How many kids these days -- even ones that shoot -- are going to 'get' "lock, stock and barrel"?)
-- www.wescottdesign.com
And talking about clichés, Wikipedia has this quote from Salvidore Dalí: "The first man to compare the flabby cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot."
-- www.wescottdesign.com
So what happens if someone just tries to write in their own dialect -- I assume that one would have to come up with spellings on one's own, at least to some extent.
Would this be greeted with joy as being sincere/nationalistic/avant- guard, or would it be considered hackneyed?
How does a writer render dialog?
-- www.wescottdesign.com
e
and
o y e e e ,the
l ,Read William Faulkner.
Yiddish spelling is a good example of phonetic German dialect.
jsw
I'm not (quite) 60, never shot firearms as a kid, but understood the meaning and roots of LS&B. ...maybe from US history.
e
and
o y e e e ,the
l ,I guess it would be just as you would if you wanted to write a dialect in english, invent you own spelling
To me as a dane written norwegian looks like danish someone who can't spell too good wrote :) danish spelling often isn't like the sound of the words, in norwegian it looks like everything is spelled like it sounds,
-Lasse
...
It *can* be done, and works to whatever extent the reader is familiar with the dialect. The problem is that everything depends on the reader being familiar with intonation and grammar.
Formal Norwegian distinguishes between singular and plural the same way English does, by appending an ending to the noun. In English one appends '-s' or '-ses'; in Norwegian one appends '-er'. So with the noun 'sau' (Eng. 'sheep'), the (official) singular is 'sau' and the (official) plural is 'sauer'.
However, in my (almost) native dialect (we moved to the area when I was about 6), this is messed up by the fact that any endings are consistently chopped off, and replaced by a very subtle change in intonation. With the example above, the singular is still 'sau', but the plural is also 'sau' but with an almost imperceptible change of intonation.
I was about six when I first learnd these things, so I used to know how to phrase the distinction myself, and I am perfectly able to hear better speakers of this dialect than myself who use it (my own spoken language has changed quite a bit sine I left the area). My parents, who were in their early thirties when we moved to the area, might know of the general mechanism, but seem to be unable to recognize, let alone use, this subtle effect.
Writing in this dialect would strip a reader unfamiliar with these idiosyncracies of just about every grammatic mechanism he is uses to employ to make sense of the semantics.
This might be an extreme example (the dialects of this particular area usually recieve significant attention in schoolbooks), but all dialects tend to present similar types of problems.
People who write dialect tend to write for a local audience, like in county yearbooks etc.
But you are onto something: Whenever there are significant divisions of opinions in the population, they tend to follow the (written) language division: Environmentalists tend to write nynorsk; No-to-EU people (we have refused to join the EU in two referenda, 1972 and 1994) tend to write nynorsk; the populus of the Norwegian equivalent to the Bible belt tend to write nynorsk; the people in the fundamental economical vocations, like fishermen, tend to write nynorsk. People in the rural, remote areas (along the coast, in the valleys) tend to write nynorsk.
Well, 'tend to' means that the relative fractions of nynorsk writers are higher in the mentioned groups than in the whole population.
Very formally. That is, in formal/normalized language with phrasings that wouldn't work orally. One might use certain grammatic or other stereotypes to indicate that a character speaks a certain dialect, but very seldomly and very cautiosly.
Rune
Actually, no.
Consider the two English words 'skirt' and 'shirt'. Then 'taste' the pronounciation and note how the respective 'sk' and 'sh' spellings indicate clearly how to pronounce the word: The 'k' in 'skirt' is clearly defined, following the 's'; the 'h' in 'shirt' clearly indicates how to modify the 's' from a 'z'-type sound towards a 'ch'-type sound.
No such nice system in Norwegian.
There is a word in Norwegian that is pronounced virtually exactly like the English 'shirt'. It is spelled 'skj=F8rt' (Eng. 'fragile').
The 'kj' plays the same part as the 'h' in the English word, but you wouldn't know that from knowledge about the 'k' and 'j' sounds, and the spelling.
These kinds of things present huge problems for kids who try to learn how to spell. They are first taught how to decode the letters in terms of sounds, and all of a sudden these kinds of things come and violate all the rules the have just learned.
Dyslexia is a common problem here.
There are also problems with common words like the 1st person personal pronoun, 'I' in English. It is spelled 'Jeg' in Norwegian bokm=E5l, but pronounced in just about any other way: Eg, ei, i, je, =E6, e, jei, j=E6i, and those are only the forms I remember off the top of my head.
And so and so forth.
Rune
English certainly isn't exempt from odd spellings, being a mix of the Celtic of the Britons, the Germanic of the Anglo-Saxons and the Viking French of the Normans, plus random Latin and Greek to make up new words like telephone.
In English many of the rural words evolved from the Germanic of King Arthur's time, and are sometimes irregular (field/Feld, cow/Kuh, spade/ Spate, hen/Hahn, mouse/Maus). The urban ones are more French and follow the rules better.
Have you encountered George Bernard Shaw's spelling of "fish" as GHOTI? GH as in laugh, O as in women, TI as in nation.
jsw
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