8
votes
Accepted
Are English 'gay' and Norwegian 'gøy' cognates?
According to the Norske Akademis Ordbok, gøy is from English “gay”.
- 4,980
6
votes
Could Danish, Swedish and Norwegian theoretically be counted as dialects of the same language?
Classification of something as a language or dialect is a socio-political decision, so to decide whether Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian should be separate dialects or separate languages or even not ...
- 284
6
votes
Accepted
Origin of the word/root 'del'
These words are related, but they do not have any known cognates outside of Germanic and Balto-Slavic. “Proto-Indo-European *dʰayl-, *dʰoyl-“ (as posited on Wikipedia) is highly uncertain. It has been ...
- 24.4k
6
votes
Accepted
Norwegian Translation Codes (no, nn, nb) - Which to use on a website?
I assume your concern is with regard to Norwegians and not compliance with some statutory requirement (if there is any such requirement, which I doubt, I am certain that it wasn't arrived at by ...
- 83.3k
5
votes
Peculiarities of English as spoken/written by Norwegians
What about translating literally some Norwegian expressions? I've heard someone says "it wasn't only-only" before now, with a thick accent of course. "only-only" is not a ...
- 4,678
4
votes
Accepted
Qualifying similarities between languages - e.g., German and Norwegian
There are two reasons why German and Norwegian seem similar. One is that they come from the same language spoken a few thousands of years ago. The second is that German had a more modern influence (...
- 83.3k
4
votes
Origin of the word/root 'del'
They definitely do go to the same common ancestor, just the first etymology you found does not go deep enough.
Norwegian del is reconstructed to proto-germanic dailiz, but that originates from PIE *...
- 2,363
4
votes
Accepted
Is wrong article use a matter of pronunciation or grammar?
The question draws a false albeit common dichotomy between grammar and pronunciation. Grammar includes the facts that in English we say "I saw your uncle" but not *"I your uncle saw", which is about ...
- 83.3k
3
votes
Norwegian Translation Codes (no, nn, nb) - Which to use on a website?
As recommended by W3C, you should be using nb as it is more specific than the macrolanguage no.
Use macrolanguages with care. Some language subtags have a Scope field set to macrolanguage, ie. this ...
- 131
3
votes
Accepted
Possessive pronoun position in north germanic languages
I would check your assumptions of what the order is in the various languages. See this paper, which is not about history, but indicates that pre- and post-nominal order co-exists in Norwegian, Faroese ...
- 83.3k
3
votes
Learning Bokmål Norwegian through a book on Nynorsk
Nynorsk and Bokmål are just two different forms for writing the same language (or at least its dialects).
Bokmål (book language) is based on the Danish writing system. Of course, it is not exactly ...
- 1,456
3
votes
Accepted
How similar are Norwegian and Swedish compared to Dutch and Flemish / German?
Tang & van Heuven 2009 "Mutual intelligibility of Chinese dialects experimentally tested" address this kind of question experimentally for Chinese dialects. They do not come up with percentages ...
- 83.3k
2
votes
Similarity between Norwegian and Danish compared to other languages?
The map question is apparently based on this, where the conclusions (apparently) are based on lexicostatistical computation. This probably does allow you to say compare the relatedness-numbers for ...
- 83.3k
2
votes
Accepted
How did Norwegian "huske" derive from ON "hugsa"?
The addition of the letter s forms an iterative verb. There are more examples in Germanic languages, e.g. Low German hoppen "to hop", High German hopsen "to bounce, to lollop".
The second step is ...
- 30.4k
2
votes
IPA transcriptions for Norwegian
One reason why there are not is that pronunciation is a bit dialect-idiosyncratic (sverd is [sʋæɖ] or [sʋæɾd], depending on dialect). Bokmål and Nynorsk are really written standards, and the 1sg ...
- 83.3k
2
votes
Is wrong article use a matter of pronunciation or grammar?
You may be making some confusion, and likely so is the other person. In English, a vs an (and the pronounced in its two different ways, too, which is similar but just not reflected in spelling) is a ...
- 1,847
1
vote
Origin of -s verbs in Norwegian and Swedish
Well, my guess is that it comes from the -sk ending in Old Norse (modern Icelandic -st ending).
As found in the famous Vǫlospá verses:
Brœðr munu BERJASK (Modern Icelandic: Bræður munu BERJAST),
...
- 1,456
1
vote
Are English 'gay' and Norwegian 'gøy' cognates?
According to Språkrådet's and Universitet i Bergen's ordboka, gøy comes from English 'guy', meaning 'make fun on', from Dutch 'guich', the etymology of which I do not know:
fra engelsk guy 'gjøre ...
- 161
1
vote
Learning Bokmål Norwegian through a book on Nynorsk
It is possible to translate from Nynorsk to Bokmål, or Nynorsk to Chinese, or any other arrangement you want. This article discusses machine translation between Nynorsk and Bokmål.
It is also possible ...
- 83.3k
1
vote
How can I distinguish modern Scandinavian languages at a glance?
The Twitter user incunabula tweeted (https://twitter.com/incunabula/status/1560597822151356416) a diagram with an algorithm to distinguish between European languages. The feature that - in this ...
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