A language learners’ forum

@Elsa Maria,
Your Danish will help you out with Norwegian in some ways that won't be apparent in early Duolingo lessons or working through lists of the most common 1,000 words. The Danish dreng and pike have their counterparts in Norwegian: dreng and pike. (You've probably discovered a common orthographic difference: where Danish uses a "g," Norwegian often uses a "k.")

Is there a term to describe word pairs in different languages that are somewhere between cognates and false friends, that are related to each other but different enough that using them as cognates could lead to awkwardness? "False cognates"? "Amenemigos"? If there were (is?), I'd use it to describe these pairings.

Native speakers of Norwegian can better speak to the nuances; my sense is that both Norwegian words have a more 19th century feel to them and (dreng more than pike, I think) a focus on hired help. A drengestue is not a house for boys, for example, but the building on the farm where the hired men lived. Did the hired men tend to be younger? Jeg har ingen anelse.

Probably you'll discover other such "amenemigos." These two happened to be the ones that came to mind for me a week or so ago, as I was starting my Danish listening skills project with the first Harry Potter chapter, "Drengen, der ikke kunne slås ihjel."

Dreng is certainly never used in the meaning of "boy" as opposed to "girl". It is right that a dreng was usually a young man who went to work on a farm - as a matter of fact my father's first job was as a dreng when he was 15 years old. He was born in 1930 and poor families at the time could not afford to have all their children go on to study, so normally they left school at 15 and many had to leave home to seek work as a "dreng".

As for pike in the meaning of "girl", I don't think anyone would use it any longer, and even in older times it was a word that would typically belong to the upper and middle class in cities like Oslo and Bergen, I suspect it is a Danish import. Rich families in Oslo would often have a "pike" in the meaning of a young girl/woman who would cook, clean and look after the children. In compensation she would get lodging, food and maybe a little bit of money for personal expenses. I am talking here about the years before the Second World War, so a very different world to what Norway is today. In the 19th century and early in the 20th century it was popular amongst wealthy people to get a "pike" from Denmark so the children would learn proper Danish.

Ogrim, thanks for your interesting family story and rich native sense of these two words. It sounds like dreng and pike are equally focused on hired help. I had no idea that wealthy Norwegian families used to hire in a pike from Denmark so the kids could learn proper Danish. That certainly suggests that an answer to the question on another active thread, about Scandinavians reading literature in other Scandinavian languages, was that 100 or 150 years ago, it was more common.

I just found a Norwegian online dictionary that marks tone in its entries. An acute accent marks tone 1 (low on the stressed syllable then high on the following syllable), and a grave accent marks tone 2 (falling on the stressed syllable then high on the following syllable).

https://naob.no/ordbok/

For example, in the entry for "kvinne", the phonetic transcription is [kvi`n:ə], with the grave accent showing that it's tone 2.

I posted this in Deinonysus' log, but it might be worth mentioning here for those using Assimil Le norvégien:
--------------------------------------

Deinonysus wrote:My Assimil superpack came in the mail today! Now I have all 5 of my courses.

20201105_213219.jpg

I've just completed Lesson 8 of Assimil - Le norvegién. Although it has the tones marked throughout the conversations (but not in the exercises, which do not introduce new words, so it shouldn't be an issue), the feminine gender is not used Anyway, I wanted to bring this to your attention. Line 5 in Lesson 8 in Norwegian goes like this:

Du må skynde deg ellers kommer du for sent igjen.

The French translation in the latest book (I have the same one as you) is as follows:

Non, c'est mon frère.

It didn't take me long (probably a few hours ) to realise the translation with just a little bit off. The older version of the book, ironically has the correction translation, which is:

Il faut que tu te dépêches (tu dois te dépêcher), sinon tu arriveras (arrives/viens) encore en retard (trop tard).

So, keep that in mind for when you reach Lesson 8 (in a few years time - hey I've got to knock out the 6WC competition anyway I can, right? )

Does anyone know where to buy episodes of Norwegian TV shows? I tried searching for Ragnarok on Amazon and Apple TV for example, and no dice.

(Again) I came to think of the title of this thread - shouldn't it be Ny på norsk instead of nytt? Or possibly Nye på norsk (if it's plural and you're referring to all learners). What do you natives say?

Xenops wrote:Does anyone know where to buy episodes of Norwegian TV shows? I tried searching for Ragnarok on Amazon and Apple TV for example, and no dice.

Strange, I found it on Amazon.com, here is the link.

Have you checked out the streaming pages of NRK? I think there are several series which are not geoblocked (or if you use a VPN you can get around that).

jeff_lindqvist wrote:(Again) I came to think of the title of this thread - shouldn't it be Ny på norsk instead of nytt? Or possibly Nye på norsk (if it's plural and you're referring to all learners). What do you natives say?

Nytt på norsk sounds like the title of a news programme (News in Norwegian). It also reminds me of the comedy show Nytt på Nytt, which is the Norwegian version of the British Have I got News for You.

To my ears, Ny på norsk or Nye på norsk doesn't sound right. You would not say "John er ny på norsk" in the meaning he is a beginner in Norwegian. You could use the word "nybegynner" about someone who just started learning something new.

jeff_lindqvist wrote:(Again) I came to think of the title of this thread - shouldn't it be Ny på norsk instead of nytt? Or possibly Nye på norsk (if it's plural and you're referring to all learners). What do you natives say?

I agree with Ogrim. I'm considering if it would be possible to say "Ny i norsk", but since I need to consider it, maybe that's a bad sign

Apart from that, I think it would be useful to hear from the OP what the intended meaning is. As Ogrim says, "Nytt på norsk" is just fine in form, but its suitability in this context isn't obvious