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From: Jerry Avins on 25 Nov 2009 15:43 Heinrich Wolf wrote: > Jerry Avins <jya(a)ieee.org> writes: >> Rune Allnor wrote: >>> On 25 Nov, 14:14, Heinrich Wolf <mu...(a)hemedarwa.de> wrote: >> ... >>>> Making ``Katzenjammer'' from ``Kater'' was then a straightforward >>>> ``Verballhornung'' (cacography). Lang lebe die deutsche Sprache! >>> I would have guessed "Katze" = "cat". In that case, >>> "katzenjammer" means something like "squealing sounds >>> made by cats". >>> But I have got burned on etymological speculations >>> in the past. >> In New York at least, katzenjammer includes "noisy hubbub" among its >> meanings. "Yammer" means lament; wail; shriek. Perhaps >> http://www.kingfeatures.com/features/comics/katzkids/about.htm led to >> the local (and colloquial) meaning. > > That would rather be ``Katzenmusik'' in German. You might want to look up > both terms at > > http://wortschatz.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/ > > I have scanned and put on the Web a work by Wilhelm Busch, author of > ``Max und Moritz'', called ``Katzenjammer am Neujahrsmorgen''. You > can find it at > > http://hemedarwa.de Thank you. I use DjVu to read the Century Dictionary at http://www.global-language.com/CENTURY/, so I had nothing to install. Jerry -- Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get. �����������������������������������������������������������������������
From: Tauno Voipio on 25 Nov 2009 15:46 Rune Allnor wrote: > On 25 Nov, 18:51, Tauno Voipio <tauno.voi...(a)notused.fi.invalid> > wrote: >> Cannot resist ... >> >> Finnish is a totally different beast from the germanic (or old >> Viking) languages: The only living language resembling Finnish >> so far that I can guess about half of it is Estonian. > > How about Sami? For somebody who knows neither Finnish > or Sami, the two have certain 'acoustic' characteristics > in common, but that might just be a coincidence? Sami is actually a group of half-dozen dialects which are so far from each other that Sami-speaking people may not understand speakers from a non-neighbour dialect. Sami is a member of the Fenno-Ugrian language group. Looked from Finnish, Sami is somewhere between Estonian and Hungarian: I can catch some expressions but most of it is incomprehensible. >> For me, with Swedish as second native language, Norwegian sounds >> like funny Swedish, > > *Formal* Norwegian (highly influenced by the dialects > in the south-east central area, near Oslo) sounds like > Donald Duck on helium. People with that kind of native > dialect would struggle very hard to be taken seriously > while speaking any non-native language. > > My native dialect seems to be a somewhat better staring > point for speaking English, and particularly Italian. Bokm�l / nynorsk? -- -Tauno
From: Rune Allnor on 25 Nov 2009 17:17 On 25 Nov, 21:46, Tauno Voipio <tauno.voi...(a)notused.fi.invalid> wrote: > Rune Allnor wrote: > >> For me, with Swedish as second native language, Norwegian sounds > >> like funny Swedish, > > > *Formal* Norwegian (highly influenced by the dialects > > in the south-east central area, near Oslo) sounds like > > Donald Duck on helium. People with that kind of native > > dialect would struggle very hard to be taken seriously > > while speaking any non-native language. > > > My native dialect seems to be a somewhat better staring > > point for speaking English, and particularly Italian. > > Bokmål / nynorsk? Those are the two *written* forms of Norwegian: Bokmål (litteraly "the language of/from the books") was based on the Danish written language established by the Danish government during the "400-year night", when Norway was a subsidiary to the Danish crown between ~1380 and 1814. The civil servants had all been trained in Denmark, and wrote Danish fluently, so the obvious thing to do was to keep business as usual. Since then the 'official' written Norwegian language was dominated by the heritage from the Danish civil service. To this day, some 200 years later, it is very little difference between written Norwegian Bokmål and written Danish. A non-native speaker of both the two languages would need to know what to look for, to see the difference. However, bokmål is strictly a written language. Some people *claim* to speak bokmål, but in reality only speaks a normalized dialect that is the closest to the written language, but still far enough away that they are two different forms. In the nationalromantic era that followed the 1814 emancipation from the Danes there was a movement to establish a home-grown Norwegian written language, to replace the heritage from the Danes. The idea was to compensate for the Danish influence, represented by the civil service and the urban establishment, by basing the new written language on the rural spoken dialects. Unfortunately, there was an over-compensation, in that the person in charge, Ivar Aasen, went to the furthest, most remote valleys he could possibly reach with 1820-30s communications. So he ended up doubly alienating his intended audience, partially by using the most obscure rural non-Danish forms he could possibly find; partially by restricting his data to the areas near the south-east central, leaving a lot of the more remote areas, particularly around the coast, uncatered for. Lots of people who might have been positive to the efforts were alienated by this over-compensation, leaving the population in two entrenched camps, fiercly disagreeing with each other. After a lot of hubbub, this written language has now become what is known as "nynorsk", "New Norwegian". Repercussions of the ancient battles are stil raging, as kids think nynorsk (which in these days is based on an average of the spoken Norwegian dialects) is "grautmål", "porrage language", while they at the same time are battling with the not at all insignificant (well, all out irrational) quirks, twists and turns associated with making an artifical written language match up with their spoken languages. As for myself, I speak a normalized (probably more so than I am aware) form of a northern dialect, that matches quite nicely with the present norm of nynorsk. (Not that it matters: I still write bokmål, as does some 80-90% of the population.) My dialect is non-typical Norwegian in that the 'melody' (prosidy?) matches quite well with both English (well, at least compared to most Norwegian dialects). Many years ago I stayed a few months in Italy, with another Norwegian who spoke one of the dominant Norwegian dialects. People who heard us talk among ourselfs could not understand how we could possibly be talking the same language. During that stay I learned that the melody/prosidy my non-normalized Norwegian dialect is particularly well matched up with the Italian langauge. Rune
From: Gunner Asch on 25 Nov 2009 20:36 On Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:51:18 +0200, Tauno Voipio <tauno.voipio(a)notused.fi.invalid> wrote: >Jim Wilkins wrote: >> On Nov 24, 8:40 pm, Rune Allnor <all...(a)tele.ntnu.no> wrote: >>> On 25 Nov, 02:12, Jim Wilkins <kb1...(a)gmail.com> wrote: >>> ... >>> >>> If you know both German and English, you should be able to >>> come a long way understanding written Norwegian and Danish, >>> and presumably also Swedish. The grammar is a simplified >>> version of the German grammar, words are concatenated >>> in much the same way as in German, and the vocabulary is >>> partially Germanic, with increasing amounts of anglicisms. >>> >>> Rune >> >> Also Dutch, after learning the voiced-unvoiced shifts etc. I can't >> really make much sense of Swedish and Finnish is of course impossible. >> > >Cannot resist ... > >Finnish is a totally different beast from the germanic (or old >Viking) languages: The only living language resembling Finnish >so far that I can guess about half of it is Estonian. Hungarian >is a distant relative: from a distance it sounds familiar, but I >cannot catch a word. The whole group of Fenno-Ugrian languages >should have gone the way of dinosaurs aeons ago. Maybe the rescue >has been the remote location we are in, similarly as the original >Viking language is deep-frozen in Icelandic. > >For me, with Swedish as second native language, Norwegian sounds >like funny Swedish, but Danish pronounciation is impossible, though >written Danish can be understood with some guesswork (or a dictionary). Hell..Finn is easy Noh, moniko sinun sedist�si on tehnyt itsemurhan t�n� vuonna? Piva! Gunner "Aren't cats Libertarian? They just want to be left alone. I think our dog is a Democrat, as he is always looking for a handout" Unknown Usnet Poster Heh, heh, I'm pretty sure my dog is a liberal - he has no balls. Keyton
From: Jim Wilkins on 25 Nov 2009 21:11
On Nov 25, 8:36 pm, Gunner Asch <gun...(a)NOSPAMlightspeed.net> wrote: > > > Piva! > > Gunner In most of that part of Europe it's BEER. |