Date: 09 Feb 2001 03:39:37 +0100 From: Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@ofug.org> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Cc: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in>, "G. Adam Stanislav" <adam@whizkidtech.net>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Lots of stuff you never knew (or needed to know) about Norwegian (was Re: Gender in Indo-European languages) Message-ID: <xzpu264ful2.fsf_-_@flood.ping.uio.no> In-Reply-To: Greg Lehey's message of "Fri, 9 Feb 2001 09:58:38 %2B1030" References: <3A81DDC9.EF6D7D84@originative.co.uk> <3.0.6.32.20010207223155.009d42a0@mail85.pair.com> <20010208110159.E2429@lpt.ens.fr> <xzpzofxffa2.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no> <20010209095838.E11145@wantadilla.lemis.com>
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Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> writes:
> On Thursday, 8 February 2001 at 14:57:57 +0100, Dag-Erling Smorgrav wrote:
> > BTW, Norwegian has a very useful word which means "the concerned
> > person", which makes it relatively easy to construct gender-neutral
> > phrases.
> Isn't "person" feminine? It is in other West European languages.
Ah, here's where it gets complicated.
In theory, Norwegian has three genders: masculine and feminine (for
people and animals), and neuter, which is used for some inanimate
objects and a very few animate objects (three non-compound words I can
think of right off the bat: "human", "animal" and - don't laugh -
"troll".) Inanimate objects are invariably masculine or neuter; using
feminine for e.g. a ship is not unheard of (particularly in coastal
regions), but I don't think it's gramatically correct.
In practice, however, the use of gender varies from dialect to
dialect. Most dialects and one of the official forms (Nynorsk - the
"new Norwegian", an artificial language constructed in the late 19th
century from a handful of dialects which were assumed to represent
"true Norwegian") use all three genders, but in the other official
form (Bokmål - the "tongue of books"), feminine is optional (masculine
is used instead), and in the now-defunct Riksmål (the "tongue of the
kingdom"), which is somewhere in between the bastardized Danish spoken
by the upper class in the 19th century and today's Bokmål, it does not
exist at all. Riksmål is still spoken to some degree in the cities,
and there are dialects (e.g. in the Bergen area) where feminine is
used only rarely and reluctantly.
Bergen, by the way, is an old hanseatic harbour city, and remains
quite idiosyncratic, which often leads both its inhabitants and the
rest of the country to wish - for slightly different reasons - that it
would declare independence from Norway. A good (and common) way to
tease people from the Bergen area is to pronounce every word ending in
"a" (the feminine singular definite ending) as if it ended in "en"
(the masculine singular definite ending) instead, including those
where the final "a" is not a gender ending, e.g. "Hansa", which is not
only the Norwegian name for the Hanseatic League but also the name of
a local brewery.
The differences bewteen Bokmål and Riksmål are not very large; one can
view Riksmål as an archaic form of Bokmål. The first major difference
is that where voiced consonants appear alone between vowels, Bokmål
replaces most of them with unvoiced ones ("p" instead of "b", "t"
instead of "d"). This process started in the mid-19th century as a
conscious effort to distanciate Norwegian from Danish (Norway
transitioned from being a Danish province since the Black Plague to
being a semi-autonomous state in the Swedish-Norwegian union, with a
short interlude as an independent kingdom in 1814-1815). The second
major difference is the reintroduction of the feminine gender. Other
differences from Danish (which Bokmål and Riksmål share) are a
formalization of contractions (i.e. many words sound more or less
alike in Danish and Norwegian, but their Danish written forms have
additional syllables which aren't normally pronounced) and a
vocabulary where many Danish (Latin- or French-influenced) words have
been replaced by equialent Norwegian words (taken from rural dialects
which had survived the four-hundred-year Danish occupation). Plus the
usual stuff one would expect from almost two hundred years of separate
evolution.
To answer your question, the Norwegian word for "person" (which,
incidentially, is "person") is indeed feminine, but most people
speaking Bokmål will treat it as if it were masculine, which (in
Bokmål at least) is an allowed alternate form. You'll find few people
treating all feminine words as feminine, and most of those will
occasionally slip and use masculine for a feminine word. True Bokmål,
Nynorsk and Riksmål are constructed languages, and the only people
speaking (or trying to speak) any of these three extremes is making a
political statement (Bokmål: left-wing, standing up for the common
laborer's rights; Nynorsk: fighting for minority rights, or trying to
fill a quota; Riksmål: right-wing conservative, monarchist, showing
off one's education or distanciating oneself from the vulgar lower
class). The rest of the country, for whom speech is a way of making
oneself understood and not a way of displaying one's political
affiliation, speak something in between those three, unless they speak
Sami, which is a weird mix of Finnish, Russian, Swedish and Norwegian
(mostly Finnish in structure and base vocabulary), in which case
they're probably Lapps standing up for minority rights. It is commonly
held that there are more Lapps living in Oslo (about 700 miles south
of Lappland) than in any single municipality in Lappland.
Personally, I speak something in between Riksmål and Bokmål, which you
might call the Western Oslo subdialect, and I can speak what you might
call the Eastern Oslo subdialect (closer to Bokmål, different
intonation, more colloquial) quite convincingly. Most people in and
around Oslo (anything from a quarter to half the country's population
depending on where you draw the line) speak something called
Østlandsdialekt (Eastern Dialect), which can be described as
colloquial Bokmål with slight variations in intonation and in the
thickness of l's and r's.
If you're wondering what I meant about a quota - Nynorsk is one of two
official languages, remember? All government offices etc. are required
to make forms and brochures available in both Bokmål and Nynorsk, and
to answer correspondance in the form preferred by the correspondant.
The national broadcasting company is required to use Nynorsk in at
least 25% of its programming (foreign-language programs excepted), and
state-owned universities and colleges are required to print at least
25% of their brochures, catalogs etc. in Nynorsk and provide Nynorsk
versions of exam papers to students who request it. To quote one of my
(French) history teachers in high school: "four million people and you
can't even agree on a language!" (then again, France is notorious for
ruthless and systematic repression of dialects and patois ever since
the inception of the public school in the mid-19th century).
A fun way of annoying Nynorsk speakers is to cross out the Nynorsk
form of the country's name ("Noreg" instead of "Norge") on postage
stamps or bills. They'll scream and shout and tell you that you're
oppressing 18% (or whatever this week's figure is) of the population,
until you point out that the number of native Nynorsk speakers is nil,
and that any figure they quote is really just a guesstimate of the
number of people speaking one of a poorly-defined number of dialects
that more or less resemble Nynorsk, and that most of those say "Norge"
and not "Noreg" anyway. My oldest brother used to do that until he got
a life (he also had a sticker advocating Riksmålsforeningen, an
association that promotes the use of Riksmål as an alternative to
Bokmål, on his bedroom door).
I have two amusing anecdotes about the Nynorsk quota, BTW - both from
the University of Oslo (which is in a Bokmål-dominated region).
The first is that of a CS prof who discovered that the envelope with
the Nynorsk copies of his exams was always coming back unopened - so
he stopped translating his exams to Nynorsk, and although a handful of
students every year tick off the box on the enrollment form that says
they want the Nynorsk version, nobody noticed (or complained) for six
years, until one of his students "stood up for his rights against the
cultural oppressors" on exam day and he got a rebuke.
The second regards the fact that the University of Oslo recently
started publishing its catalog of courses in Nynorsk instead of
Bokmål. I don't know the official reason for this, but the word around
the campfire is that they found out that it was big enough to satisfy
the Nynorsk quota on its own, so they could stick to Bokmål for the
rest of the year (for additional credit, take a wild guess at how much
of the information in the catalog actually changes from year to
year...)
DES (if you read this far, you need a life)
--
Dag-Erling Smorgrav - des@ofug.org
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