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by vidarh
2079 days ago
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Saying it "never works" is taking it too far. It depends what your goals are. Norwegian is "standardised". There are official versions of the two variants that are used. The prescription has significantly affected the evolution of both variants over decades of gradual language reforms used to bring them closer together. E.g. we used to count closer to Danish in one of the Norwegian variants - 27 used to be "syv og tyve" ("seven and twenty"), while it is now "tjuesju", both altering the order and the words for twenty and seven. The Danish form was abolished in 1951. You'll still hear people - especially older - use the Danish form now and again, but it has become relatively rare outside of small geographic areas. It does however not work if you're not prepared to deal with real-world use. E.g. "syv" was reintroduced as a valid (but deprecated) word for "seven", because its use has remained more persistent and proved harder to eradicate. Norwegian language reforms have mostly been quite pragmatic in that respect - there's a general direction of travel, but the reforms sometimes undoes changes that proves not to "take". But control over what is taught as "correct" in schools has proven to work quite well as a means of making these changes happen, as long as you're patient and accept that certain types of changes are a lot easier to make happen than others. It also of course matters that the changes makes sense to the users of the language. In the case of the "Danish counting" a lot of Norwegian dialects already used the "new" form, so it was a simplification, not a new
invention - getting people to buy into something entirely new is generally harder. |
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