Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Tor3 1676 days ago
Nitpick - some of the variations between Swedish and Norwegian is because Swedish and Norwegian ended up with different words from Middle Low German, i.e. the differences stem back from the Hansa period, and not as late as the French relations of the 1700s. So, "fönster", for example, didn't get picked from French, it's from Middle Low German "vinster" (which became "finster, fynster" and then "fönster" in Swedish). In this case the Middle Low German word replaced the older Swedish word (which did have the same origin as the current Danish and Norwegian words for "window"), but that replacement didn't happen in Norwegian/Danish (in other cases one or both did pick up a word from Middle Low German, but it may have been a different word because the traders in Bergen weren't the same ones which operated in Sweden).
1 comments

I love a nitpick, thanks for the impromptu history lesson. I really need to read up more on the Hansa period.