Ask Lemmy

Fellow Norwegian here. Seems like you've encountered a classic "sær skrivingsfeil". (For non-norwegians: The type of mistake described in the main post is called "særskrivingfeil", "sær skrivingsfeil" means "odd/weird writing error" and is itself a mistake of the "særskrivingsfeil" type.)

Personally I would probably answer the sj/kj issue, but I saw that you've mentioned it in a comment, and after thinking a little about it there is a bigger issue I have: People don't love the langauge. What I mean is that Norwegian is a beautiful language with many amazing words, but because people don't love it there is a perception that the langauge is "limited" or "boring". I'd love to read books in Norwegian, but the fact is that most authours/translators I've come across aren't very good at Norwegian, and it makes the book worse to read. Part of this issue is with machine translation. I was talking to a family member about this, and he mentioned that he had noticed a trend in the Donald Duck comics (which are/were hugely popular in Norway) from when he was young, and the lead translator of the comics was a teacher of Norwegian who loved the language, and the newer ones, after machine translation has taken over, and the difference was night and day. However, just to not be entierly negative I'll give you an example of someone who did this well: the people who translated the Spook's series (Den Siste Lærling) did a stellar job in my estimation with giving the names of things good Norwegian names and generally translating it well.

English, on the other hand, I feel like has not suffered as much from this, because they have benefited greatly from prominent writers who loved the language. I'm talking particularly within the sphere of fantasy, as that is where I am most familiar, where people like Tolkien and Gary Gygax are both extremely prominent writers who loved English and would use all those words that would (I think) have fallen out of the language if they hadn't put them in the public eye. I also think that while others who aren't as invested in the language would go on and write later, they would borrow some of the style from these earlier writers, because that's what the genre "sounds like". I think Norway needs a movement like this. People who dig up obscure Norwegian words that they can use as lables for things, and by doing that thrusts those words into the minds of readers, who will look up the definitions of those words and have richer lexicons as a result.

Problem: ambiguity of date terms like saying "this Wednesday" on a Thursday. Is the speaker referring to yesterday or the coming Wednesday six days from now? Not always clear.

Solution: I propose standardising our understanding of the week as beginning Monday, ending Sunday. At any point in the current week, "this whateverday" refers to that day in the current week, no matter if it's past or future. "Next whateverday" refers to that day in the upcoming Monday through Sunday week.

"This Wednesday", on a Thursday, is referring to yesterday.

"Next Wednesday", on a Thursday, is referring to a day six days from now.

(I also suggest adopting ISO 8601, writing dates in year-month-day order to avoid that ugly ambiguity.)

The fact that it can be read so many different ways depending on the accent. I have a different accent than those around me, and it's inevitable to feel expectations violated.

Apparently people also find it funny when I say the word "envelope". "Hey it's Leni, say envelope" they might say, maybe with me responding "guys, I'm not a freaking circus seal" like Jango Fett has a secret pet in denial.

All the French that's embedded in it. Stupid Normans making it sound weird if I go to a restaurant and order pig.

Actually, I find the french and double dose of viking influence quite fascinating. English etymology is a wild ride!

dutch: our accent is the absolute worst thing.

In Russian to say "I saw a video" sounds like "Ia VIDel VIDeo" which just sounds stupid too. Everytime I say it I have to rollback, find a synonym, and repeat the sentence in less stupid way

Thresh + hold = threshold. Why did they drop the middle 'H'? You still have to pronounce both 'H's, and they don't even have the same sound. They're the worst kind of portmanteau, but they're in the dictionary.

Hebrew. I hate how everything is gendered. You cant communicate with a person without assuming his/her gender. You cant ask "how are you?" or "what is your name?" without using the other person's gender. Its worse than spanish/italian. We have genders for verbs, our "you" is gendered, heck, NUMBERS have genders (two girls, two boys - you use a different word for two).

Have you ever spoken to a person and werent sure about their gender? In hebrew you would be screwed.

So in German we have these weird symbols: äßöü one of them is even in my name. In my opinion they are not necessary and cause more trouble that they are worth.

UTF 8 has alleviated some of the pain. However I still regularly find documents encoded in old character encodings and I have to manually fix all these accents.

I also have one of them in my name. In the past in school a SYS-Admin entered my name with an ö instead of the alternate form oe. All was fine. I was about 13yo, so I had no idea about backups and didn't care. I stored all my files on their NAS. One day they had drive failures and could recover all data except from students with accents in their name. I don't know what shitty software they used but I am still annoyed at this.

We also have das,dass which I always get wrong while writing texts.

There are some good things. The time forms can be pretty fun to use.

All in all German is a 6/10 for me could be better could be worse.

Any number higher than twelve is said the wrong way around, for example instead of ninety-two we say two-and-ninety.

English isn't really a language, it's a shambling amalgamation of a bunch of different languages so it's got all sorts of insane, nonsensical rules and exceptions. I can totally understand why it's a frustrating language to pick up, and IDK that I would've bothered to learn if it wasn't my native language.

In German, the formal address is the same as the third-person plural, just capitalized. This can lead to ambiguities when talking.

Oh no, the most I’ve dealt with a similar problem is knowing when to use porque vs. por que in Spanish. I still don’t know

When Swedish translators try to create a Swedish name for an English character it always ends up sounding silly. Batman was named "läderlappen" (the leather patch) for example.

Yesterday I heard that they translated Pennywise the clown as "clownen Snåljåpen", which I guess gets the literal meaning across but also makes him feel like more of a stingy old man than an actual villain.

My language is diglossic - it has a written form and a spoken form that are very different to each other. It's quite difficult to understand the written form if you've only grown up speaking and listening to the language, as the written form is essentially the language as spoken in the 1600s.

To compare it to English, it would be like saying "Where are you?" to someone over the phone, but then having to send them "Wherefore art thou?" as a text.