LOTR Forum

"Troels Forchhammer" skrev i en meddelelse


 > I'm rather curious as to the derivation of Danish and Norwegian
 > (contemporary), as it is my impression (as a native speaker of one of
 > them) that these two are closer related (or at least more mutually
 > intelligible) than any other pair (there is of course a difference
 > between the two Norwegian languages, so I might have to ask whether the
 > above is Bokmål or Nynorsk).

You have to keep in mind that languages do not only diverge by being
isolated from each other. They may also converge by contact, even if they
retain their individual identities. Old English seems to have been rather
heavily influenced by Norse, or modern English would have resembled Dutch or
Frisian much more than it does, or so I've read. OE was apparently
sufficiently closely related to ON that they could, with difficulty,
understand each other, which means that they could more easily pick up words
from each other's languages as a natural rather than planned process. And
as for dialects within a language - the distinction between "separate
dialect" and "separate language" being of course fuzzy - they may also
converge. It even seems that, except for synnejysk, a person from
Copenhagen without linguistic training in the various Danish dialects may
actually understand at least young Jutes these days - blame the electronic
media, if you will.
As for Danish and Norwegian, you have to remember that the capital of
Norway was called Copenhagen for four hundred years. In southern Norway
there was much direct contact with Denmark, with fishermen visiting each
other's shores, often finding wives, and all over Norway civil servants
spoke more or less Danish and certainly wrote it, since they had been
trained there. So even if we assume that the average Danish language a
millennium ago resembled the average Swedish language more than the average
Norwegian language, it is not to be wondered at that this has changed.
Of course a thousand years ago eastern Denmark had been fairly recently
invaded by the tribe that named Denmark, and which came from what is now
Sweden. Did their language supersede the language of Jutland, whence part
of the population of western Norway may have come? At any rate, it seems
that the differences in language were not at all great.

Hrafn.<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->

the softrat wrote:
 > You betchum! Did I screw up again? If so yours will be only the third
 > such notice in all the years of operation, and one set of those
 > notices is from the Lallands Freaks who demand that Scots Ebonics be
 > recognized as a language.

I represent that remarque!

--Jamie. (a Dover edition designed for years of use!)
andrews .uwo } Merge these two lines to obtain my e-mail address.
@csd .ca } (Unsolicited "bulk" e-mail costs everyone.)<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->