Category: Norwegian (norsk)

Telling tales

By Simon

Earlier this week I went to a Christmas show entitled Beasts and Beauties in Kendal. It wasn’t a traditional Christmas pantomime, though did include some pantomimesque elements, but rather a series of eight fairy/folk tales from around Europe, including:

– The Emperor’s New Clothes or Kejserens nye Klæder by Hans Christian Andersen (Danish)
– Bluebeard or La Barbe bleue by Charles Perrault (French)
– The Juniper Tree or Von dem Machandelboom a story collected by the Brothers Grimm in Low German
– The Girl and the North Wind (Norwegian). This one was originally The Lad who went to the North Wind or Gutten som gikk til nordavinden

It was all in English in various accents with occasional words in the other languages, and was well put together and acted.

It’s interesting to see the original texts of these tales and to discover the ways they start, which tend to be formulaic – the equivalents of the English ‘Once upon a time’. For example stories might start with ‘For mange Aar siden …’ in Danish, ‘Il était une fois …’ in French, ‘Dat is nu all lang heer …‘ in Low German, ‘Det var engang …‘ in Norwegian,

Such stories are usually referred to as fairy tales/stories or folk tales/stories. The word tale comes from the Old English talu (story, tale), from the Old Germanic *talō, from the Proto-Indo-European root *del- (to recount, count), which is also the root of talk, tell, tall and teller, which arrived via Old Norse, as well as the Dutch word taal (speech), the German word zahl (number) and the Danish tale (speech) [source].

The worm that turned

By Simon

cartoon worm

While working in my garden this afternoon I dug up lots of worms, so I thought it might be interesting to find out more about the word worm.

Meanings of worm (/wɜːm/ /wɝm/) include:

– a member of the genus Lumbricus; a slender, creeping, naked, limbless animal, usually brown or reddish, with a soft body divided into a series of segments; an earthworm. More widely, any annelid, terrestrial, aquatic, or marine;
– any animal that creeps or crawls; a reptile; an insect;
– serpent, snake, dragon;
– four-footed animals considered noxious or objectionable.

Some of these meanings are archaic or obsolete.

There have been many variant spellings, including wirm, wrim, wyrme, weorm, werm, werme, wurm, wurem, orm, wrm, wourme, woirme, woorme, worme, and it finally settled on worm.

Worm comes from the Old English wyrm (a serpent, snake, dragon), from the Proto-Germanic *wurmiz (serpent, worm), from the Proto-Indo-European *wrmi-/*wrmo- (worm), possibly from *wer- (to turn). *wrmi-/*wrmo- is also the root of the Irish and Scottish Gaelic word gorm (blue/black), the Welsh gwrm (dusky), the Danish/Norwegian/Swedish orm (snake), the Latin vermis, which is the root of the English words vermilion and vermin, and quite a few other words in various languages.

Some interesting worm factoids

– there are some 2,700 different types of worms
– an acre of land can contain over a million worms
– Cleopatra VII made the export of worms from Egypt a capital crime as she realized the important roll they play in keeping soil fertile
– Charles Darwin studied worms for many years and concluded that they are one of the most important creatures on earth.

Sources: Oxford English Dictionary, Online Etymology Dictionary, Wikipedia, Word-Origins.com, Eartworm Farming, Worm Facts

Levees and ganseys

By Simon

Last night the words levee and gansey came up in conversation and while I’d heard both of them before, I wasn’t entirely sure of the meaning of the former, or the origins of the latter. I did know that a levee had something to with flood prevention and was something you drive your chevy to, and that gansey sounded similar to the Irish word, geansaí (jersey, jumper), though I hadn’t heard it used in English before.

A levee, /lɪˈviː/ or /ˈlɛviː/, is a natural embankment along a river formed by sedimentation, or a man-made embankment along a river or around a field designed to prevent flooding. It is also a landing place or quay; a formal ceremony held when a sovereign gets up in the morning, or an afternoon reception for men at court [source].

Levee in the sense of a man-made flood-prevention embankment is apparently used mainly in American English (especially in the Midwest and Deep South), and was first used in English in New Orleans in around 1720. Other words for levee include levée, dike/dyke, embankment, floodbank and stopbank.

Etymology: the feminine form of the past participle of the French verb lever (to raise), from the Latin levare (to raise), from levis (light in weight), from the Proto-Indo-European root *le(n)gwh- (light, easy, agile, nimble) [source].

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, gansey, /ˈgænzɪ/, is a jersey or pullover and is a dialect variant of Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands famous for its knitted sweaters. It is also written gansy, ganzee, ganzey, ganzie & ganzy. This dictionary also has a Guernsey coat, “a thick, knitted, closely-fitting vest or shirt, generally made of blue wool, worn by seamen”, which is also known as a Garnesie, Garnsey or Gernsey.

Another source claims that the word gansey comes from “a word of Scandinavian origin meaning ‘tunic'”. This sounds plausible as the Norwegian word for such a garment is genser [source], though it’s possible that the Norwegian word comes from Britain or Ireland.

The Art of the Fishing Communities website, “Ganseys (Guernseys), Jerseys, Aran and Fair Isle are names given to fishermen’s knitted pullovers that were universally popular in the 19th and early 20th century. Each fishing village had its own pattern and within the local pattern there were small variations, and sometimes names, that identified the family and individual.”

The Irish word for jersey or sweater, and also the island of Guernsey, is geansaí /gʲansiː/, sounds similar to gansey and possibly comes from the same source. The word is also found in Manx – gansee and in Scottish Gaelic – geansaidh.

What do you call a knitted woollen top?

Jumper, sweater, pullover and jersey, and indeed gansey, are all used in the UK, and I normally say jumper.

Norwegian (Norsk)

By Simon

Learning Norwegian is apparently quite a challenge, according to an article I came across yesterday. Not only do you have two written forms of Norwegian to wrestle with, but also numerous dialects of spoken Norwegian.

Most Norwegian language courses teach you to read and write Bokmål, the most widely-used of the two standard written forms of Norwegian, and to speak Standard Østnorsk (Standard East Norwegian), which is considered the standard spoken form of Bokmål. Standard Østnorsk is spoken mainly by the middle and upper classes in the cities of eastern Norway, including the capital, Olso, and is closer to Danish than other Norwegian dialects.

When you try to communicate with people from other regions of Norway however, you’ll probably find it difficult to understand their dialects, which tend to be closer to Nynorsk, the other written form of Norwegian. There are also considerable differences in the dialects of different regions, and Norwegians don’t tend to adapt their language to make it easier for learners to understand them, perhaps because relatively few people study Norwegian.

A Norwegian lecturer who specializes in Norwegian as a second language at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology is mentioned in the article as “calling for her fellow Norwegians to tone down their dialects, so that non-natives trying to learn Norwegian can hope to understand them”.

There are quite a few other articles about Norwegian in Norwegian, English, German, French and a number of other languages at www.sprakrad.no.

I haven’t got round to learning Norwegian yet. One day I’d like to though.

Are you studying Norwegian? Have you encountered any of the problems discussed in the article?