I need a scandinavian!

brinxmat · Joined: Oct 24, 2005 Posts: 262 Location: Norway

One of the reasons for the similarities between the different Germanic languages is that they exist in close proximity to one another -- the trade links between the Scandinavian countries and the North European countries has also shaped the languages.

The influence of low German in Norwegian is extensive, like the mentioned "safety" in Norwegian is "sikkerhet" (the low German word), whereas in Icelandic they have "öryggi". Both N. and I. have "trygg" which means safe in N. and "insurance" in I.

Do the non-Norwegians understand this, for example:

Eg vil ikkje vekkje åtgaum ved å gaule så høgt at det blir atterljom.

bachus · Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2007 5:35 am Post subject:

Antimon · Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2007 5:39 am Post subject:

Oskar · Joined: Jul 29, 2004 Posts: 1751 Location: Norway

blue hell · Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2007 10:34 am Post subject:

Antimon · Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2007 10:51 am Post subject:

Oskar · Joined: Jul 29, 2004 Posts: 1751 Location: Norway

Oskar · Joined: Jul 29, 2004 Posts: 1751 Location: Norway

brinxmat · Joined: Oct 24, 2005 Posts: 262 Location: Norway

All good stuff here...and this isn't actually that unusual, apart from "åtgaum" and "atterljom", which are really only literary (though a person I work with said that the newspaper advertised "åtgaumsvekkjande glimmergensere" for ladies. I did a word-for-word gloss in Bokmål and English.



Eg  | vil  | ikkje | vekkje | åtgaum        | ved | å  | gaule | så | høgt | at   | det      | blir    | atterljom.


Jeg | vil  | ikke  | vekke  | oppmerksomhet | ved | å  | rope  | så | høyt | at   | det      | blir    | ekko.


I   | will | not   | wake   | attention     | by  | to | shout | so | loud | that | it/there | becomes | echo.

"I don't want to raise attention by shouting so loud that it makes an echo"

åtgaum is a combination of "åt", which generally means "towards" and "gaum", which means "attention" -- hence "gje gaum", pay attention. "Atterljom" is quite literally "again-(loud-)sound",

If you're interested and read Norwegian, the following is quite wonderful: http://www.dokpro.uio.no/perl/ordboksoek/ordbok.cgi

Off to Sweden tomorrow to drink some ale. Gosh I hate preformatted text.

blue hell · Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2007 1:09 pm Post subject:

Oskar · Joined: Jul 29, 2004 Posts: 1751 Location: Norway

blue hell · Posted: Tue Oct 30, 2007 4:04 pm Post subject:

The Frisian û sounds a bit like the double o in English "good". "Lyd" makes me think of the Dutch (and German and Frisian, be it with slightly different pronunciations) word "lied", or song. A thing that seems to happen is that words get a slightly different meaning when they spread out over the globe. This is one of the things that makes German a difficult language for me as there are a lot of similar words with different meanings, not like totally different, but different enough to be wrong or embarrassing when used the Dutch way.

It's funny, long ago when at school I really was a no good at languages, math is more my thing, but with time language seems to get more interesting. Maybe because I read and write more in English than in Dutch nowadays (still English clearly is a language I learned "too late", I'll never be fluent in it, not as in Dutch).

Nosferatu · Joined: Jul 27, 2007 Posts: 234 Location: Planet Rock.

Antimon · Posted: Wed Oct 31, 2007 10:54 am Post subject:

Oskar · Joined: Jul 29, 2004 Posts: 1751 Location: Norway

Antimon · Posted: Wed Oct 31, 2007 11:27 am Post subject:

Antimon · Posted: Wed Oct 31, 2007 11:31 am Post subject:

It's also like people imitating your dialect. My dialect is often found amusing when I travel to other places in the country, and people try to imitate. They never get it right, and more often than not are so far from sounding anything like people from my region that I'm surprised that they're not ashamed by what they're doing. But then I'm thinking: maybe they simply can't hear the mistakes they are making.

/Stefan

seraph · Posted: Wed Oct 31, 2007 3:10 pm Post subject:

seraph · Posted: Wed Oct 31, 2007 3:16 pm Post subject:

seraph · Posted: Wed Oct 31, 2007 3:24 pm Post subject:

blue hell · Posted: Wed Oct 31, 2007 3:47 pm Post subject:

elektro80 · Posted: Wed Oct 31, 2007 3:50 pm Post subject:

Cool, we have "brown" stuff and "yellow" stuff in Norwegian cuisine as well.
When I think of it, we even have some beige, grey, greenish ( as in kermit with a hint of mint ) and some stuff I´m not too sure about. At least it doesn´t move much unless you call it by name.

memedesigner · Joined: Feb 11, 2006 Posts: 59 Location: Berlin, Germany

Nosferatu · Joined: Jul 27, 2007 Posts: 234 Location: Planet Rock.