Re: Indo-European Languages and Gramatical Gender Loss

On 15 kesä, 02:33, Trond Engen <trond...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
phogl...@xxxxxx skreiv:

On 14 kesä, 16:19, Trond Engen <trond...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

phogl...@xxxxxx skreiv:

So you are in favour of Nynorsk? Nice.

Well, I'm either a friend or a traitor. I'm highly sympathetic
towards it, and I think Norwegian public life (and especially
business) sees far too little of it. Myself, though, I grew up in
Bokmål country and have always written Bokmål.

I see. I have always wanted to learn Nynorsk, and when I was
twentysomething years old, I made some serious attempts at it -

Is there any living or dying language you have not yet made a serious
attempt at?

Oh, there certainly are. To name just one example, I am entirely
ignorant of the grammatical features of the Dravidian languages. I
have no idea whatsoever of Tamil or Malayalam. Also, I have never even
tried to learn either Chinese, Japanese or Korean, although I have
found most of my Korean acquaintances rather likeable. Besides, that
Han'gul alpabet is nice.


I read practically everything there was in Nynorsk at our local
library, and it was quite a lot - from Turid Farbregd's translations
of Finnish literature (such as Erno Paasilinna's "Den forsvunne
armeen") to such classics as "Bondestudentar" and "Ferdaminni". The
latter I liked very much, although I think I had understood much less
if I hadn't been relatively fluent in Modern Icelandic at that time.

I would think your native knowledge of Finland Swedish came handy, too.

It is not strictly native - it is a language that exists in my family,
but I have learnt it later than Finnish, although when I was 20-30
years old, I generally spoke much less Finnish than Swedish.

My introduction to classical Nynorsk on a large scale was Leiv
Heggstad's translation of "Egil's Saga" which I read at nine. Since then
I've never managed to read sagas in Bokmål.

I read my sagas in Icelandic, but I can guess what I mean.

Vinje and Garborg are both 19th century writers. They are the two first
important authors in Nynorsk with the possible exception of Ivar Aasen
himself. Vinje was a contemporary of Aasen and for a short time actually
a classmate of the young Henrik Ibsen (Ibsen and Vinje started a
satirical magazine together after finishing school). Garborg is a
generation younger. They came from different areas of Norway and used
their different backgrounds to develop and explore the possibilities of
the young written language.

Yes, that is how it appeared to me too.

The most important of the third generation of writers are Kristoffer
Uppdal and Olav Duun. Both spent years with manual labour before they
got education and took to writing, and both were concerned with the
transformation of society. Kristoffer Uppdal wrote the series of novels
"Dansen gjennom skuggeheimen" ("The dance through the Shadow Land" acc.
to Wikipedia) on the dawn of the working class. It's sort of the
Norwegian equivalent of "la Recherche du temps perdu", the book
everybody praise and nobody have read. Olav Duun's last book, "Menneske
og maktene" is one of the best novels I've read (which of course is
subjective. I range it up there with Rushdie's "Shame" and Garcia
Marques' "Love in the time of Cholera") It's both a description of the
fierce forces of the west coast nature of Duun's youth, a collective
novel with deep dives into the psychology of all its characters, and an
allegory over the world on the rim of a second world war.

I think I have tried something by Duun, but of Uppdal's "Dansen
gjennom skuggeheimen" I know only the title. Maybe I should try it
just for the sheer hell of it. I usually learn a language by tackling
just that sort of books.


The fourth generation consists of Tarjei Vesaas, born in the same parish
in Telemark as Vinje almost a century before him. He is generally
considered Norways most important post-war writer, a nature symbolist
dealing with the psychology of the outsider, the destructiveness of the
unspoken and the hope beyond the fundamental loss. He was married to the
popular poet Halldis Moren Vesaas, who also wrote in Nynorsk.

Yes, I have read Is-slottet, when I was twenty years old.

And of course, when they published that big paperback package of my
old favourite Kjartan Flögstad a couple of years ago, I of course
ordered the whole load. I haven't read them all yet, but it's because
of time-shortage rather than difficulties with the language.

Kjartan Fløgstad is the head name of the generation who had their debut
around 1970. His use of the language is free and contemporary and he
recieved a prize from the Norwegian union for linguistic unity (or
whatever my lot call themselves in English).

Oh, _that_ lot. Nice. One of the first books about sociolinguistics
that I have read was "Språkleg samling på norske folkemåls grunn", a
collection of articles from "Språkleg samling".

He is an independent
Marxist and has been concerned with what he sees as the Labour Party's
and the old labour movement's betrayal of the working class. Except from
that he's a very funny writer, and almost every personal or geographical
name in his books are carefully constructed puns. Still, finding his
political agenda generally boring I've not been able to finish more than
one or two of his books.

His agenda does mar some of his writing, but as I hadn't read any of
the Latin American literature when I started to read him, I found the
Latin American influence in his writing quite original and
interesting. Besides, back then in Finland even the independent
Marxist agenda was a novelty. We had neo-Stalinism in the seventies,
no Maoism and no independent Marxism, at least among the leading
writers and artists. Actually, for me Dag Solstad's "High School
Teacher Pedersen's description of the great political revival that has
ravaged our country" read like a description of Finnish Neo-Stalinism,
although it was about Maoism.


The latest book I read in Nynorsk was by Frode Grytten. He has written
entertaing short stories and a couple of surreal novels from his home
town Odda.

I'll take note, thanks.

.

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