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Old Danish - Discussion | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4845 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes  Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 9 of 10 29 August 2012 at 2:00pm | IP Logged |
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Technically, Norwegian Bokmål is an East Scandinavian language and Nynorsk a West Scandinavian language. Sounds crazy, but that's the way it is.
If I am informed correctly, Bokmål used to be more or less Danish spoken with a Norwegian accent. The transformation into a language of its own began in the 19th century. There is even a very conservative variant of Norwegian (Riksmål) that's still very close to Danish, but I don't know if anyone still uses it today. If you're interested in this topic, I'd recommend to read the Wikipedia article about Norwegian. It's very informative and goes more into detail than I can do here. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5454 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 10 of 10 29 August 2012 at 5:02pm | IP Logged |
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It is a myth that Ivar Aasen based Nynorsk (or Landsmål, as he called it) only on dialects from Vestlandet. He did
however favour rural dialects and dialect forms that could be traced back to Old Norse. He tried to avoid words and grammatical constructions of Danish and German origin. He travelled around most of Southern Norway including Østlandet, Trøndelag and Sørlandet. He also studied the dialects of southern Nordland. Since the times of Ivar Aasen, Nynorsk has undergone a series of spelling reforms. At the time Ivar Aasen created Nynorsk, Bokmål didn’t exist. The written language in Norway was Danish. Most people lived in the countryside and spoke Norwegian dialects. The urban elites spoke Dano-Norwegian (basically Danish with Norwegian pronunciation and vocabulary). During the 19th century, Norwegian authors (among them Wergeland, Bjørnson, Ibsen, Asbjørnsen and Moe) began introducing Norwegian words into their written Danish. Since then, the written Dano-Norwegian language has been gradually transformed into modern Bokmål. This has been done partly through the Norwegianization efforts by influential authors, but also by the authorities through a series of controversial spelling reforms. In the 1950s parents in the affluential Western neighbourhoods of Oslo burnt their children’s school books in protest because they were unhappy about the changes introduced by the 1938 spelling reform. We talk about “spelling reforms” in Norway, but many of these have dealt with a lot more than spelling, so a better term would be “language reform”. Bokmål shares traits with both West Scandinavian and East Scandinavian languages. In it’s most “conservative” form it is close to written Danish (East Scandinavian), and in it’s most “radical” form it is close to Nynorsk (West Scandinavian). When it comes to mutual intelligibility between the modern Scandinavian languages, the classification into East and West is not that relevant. I think a classification into Insular Scandinavian (Icelandic and Faroese) and Continental Scandinavian (Danish, Swedish and Norwegian) makes more sense. Edited by tractor on 29 August 2012 at 5:03pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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