What is awesome in German?

Thanks, Rune. I'm afraid that all the dialects sound like funny Swedish to me ...

Hi Rune, I know the word but I never really knew the exact meaning. Looked it up at

it means "Ehrfurchteinflössend" Awe-inspiring, it sounds very old fashioned in german.

greetings Frank

PS don´t forget to Zünd the Umlaut!

For me as a german, who learned some Norwegian 18 years ago (and using it in regular vacations) and who currently learns Swedish, Swedish sounds like fuzzy Norwegian ;-)

Takk, det var veldig interessant.

Yes; I've noticed that people in northern Norway use words from Nynorsk (as far as I'm able to understand).

bye Andreas

Lock: Flintlock mechanism. Stock: wooden holder to fit your shoulder. Barrel: tube which fires the bullet

It's not really common use, now that we've progressed past flintlocks.

You're 60 freakin' years old and still have opportunities to stretch those old brain cells!

I knew what it meant whenever I thought hard about it, but for the most part it's just another cliché rattling around in the old brain pan.

(We need _new_ metaphors to replace these old clichés that you have to be a historian to understand their meaning. How many kids these days -- even ones that shoot -- are going to 'get' "lock, stock and barrel"?)

And talking about clichés, Wikipedia has this quote from Salvidore Dalí: "The first man to compare the flabby cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot."

So what happens if someone just tries to write in their own dialect -- I assume that one would have to come up with spellings on one's own, at least to some extent.

Would this be greeted with joy as being sincere/nationalistic/avant- guard, or would it be considered hackneyed?

How does a writer render dialog?

Read William Faulkner.

Yiddish spelling is a good example of phonetic German dialect.

jsw

I'm not (quite) 60, never shot firearms as a kid, but understood the meaning and roots of LS&B. ...maybe from US history.

I guess it would be just as you would if you wanted to write a dialect in english, invent you own spelling

To me as a dane written norwegian looks like danish someone who can't spell too good wrote :) danish spelling often isn't like the sound of the words, in norwegian it looks like everything is spelled like it sounds,

-Lasse

...

It *can* be done, and works to whatever extent the reader is familiar with the dialect. The problem is that everything depends on the reader being familiar with intonation and grammar.

Formal Norwegian distinguishes between singular and plural the same way English does, by appending an ending to the noun. In English one appends '-s' or '-ses'; in Norwegian one appends '-er'. So with the noun 'sau' (Eng. 'sheep'), the (official) singular is 'sau' and the (official) plural is 'sauer'.

However, in my (almost) native dialect (we moved to the area when I was about 6), this is messed up by the fact that any endings are consistently chopped off, and replaced by a very subtle change in intonation. With the example above, the singular is still 'sau', but the plural is also 'sau' but with an almost imperceptible change of intonation.

I was about six when I first learnd these things, so I used to know how to phrase the distinction myself, and I am perfectly able to hear better speakers of this dialect than myself who use it (my own spoken language has changed quite a bit sine I left the area). My parents, who were in their early thirties when we moved to the area, might know of the general mechanism, but seem to be unable to recognize, let alone use, this subtle effect.

Writing in this dialect would strip a reader unfamiliar with these idiosyncracies of just about every grammatic mechanism he is uses to employ to make sense of the semantics.

This might be an extreme example (the dialects of this particular area usually recieve significant attention in schoolbooks), but all dialects tend to present similar types of problems.

People who write dialect tend to write for a local audience, like in county yearbooks etc.

But you are onto something: Whenever there are significant divisions of opinions in the population, they tend to follow the (written) language division: Environmentalists tend to write nynorsk; No-to-EU people (we have refused to join the EU in two referenda, 1972 and 1994) tend to write nynorsk; the populus of the Norwegian equivalent to the Bible belt tend to write nynorsk; the people in the fundamental economical vocations, like fishermen, tend to write nynorsk. People in the rural, remote areas (along the coast, in the valleys) tend to write nynorsk.

Well, 'tend to' means that the relative fractions of nynorsk writers are higher in the mentioned groups than in the whole population.

Very formally. That is, in formal/normalized language with phrasings that wouldn't work orally. One might use certain grammatic or other stereotypes to indicate that a character speaks a certain dialect, but very seldomly and very cautiosly.

Rune

Actually, no.

Consider the two English words 'skirt' and 'shirt'. Then 'taste' the pronounciation and note how the respective 'sk' and 'sh' spellings indicate clearly how to pronounce the word: The 'k' in 'skirt' is clearly defined, following the 's'; the 'h' in 'shirt' clearly indicates how to modify the 's' from a 'z'-type sound towards a 'ch'-type sound.

No such nice system in Norwegian.

There is a word in Norwegian that is pronounced virtually exactly like the English 'shirt'. It is spelled 'skj=F8rt' (Eng. 'fragile').

The 'kj' plays the same part as the 'h' in the English word, but you wouldn't know that from knowledge about the 'k' and 'j' sounds, and the spelling.

These kinds of things present huge problems for kids who try to learn how to spell. They are first taught how to decode the letters in terms of sounds, and all of a sudden these kinds of things come and violate all the rules the have just learned.

Dyslexia is a common problem here.

There are also problems with common words like the 1st person personal pronoun, 'I' in English. It is spelled 'Jeg' in Norwegian bokm=E5l, but pronounced in just about any other way: Eg, ei, i, je, =E6, e, jei, j=E6i, and those are only the forms I remember off the top of my head.

And so and so forth.

Rune

English certainly isn't exempt from odd spellings, being a mix of the Celtic of the Britons, the Germanic of the Anglo-Saxons and the Viking French of the Normans, plus random Latin and Greek to make up new words like telephone.

In English many of the rural words evolved from the Germanic of King Arthur's time, and are sometimes irregular (field/Feld, cow/Kuh, spade/ Spate, hen/Hahn, mouse/Maus). The urban ones are more French and follow the rules better.

Have you encountered George Bernard Shaw's spelling of "fish" as GHOTI? GH as in laugh, O as in women, TI as in nation.

jsw

So how would you write when preparing a presentation? Are slides written or spoken? Is your script (assuming you prepare one for practice / reference) written or spoken (shorthand is OK, it's not usually word for word anyway)?

Tim

I interpreted the question as how face-to-face dialogue is represented in the literature, which has little if anything to do with how people actually speak. Presentations and slides have a different purpose than to represent actual dialogue.

The presentation I make are given in English, which is the professional language around here. I can't remember the last time I gave a presentation to a Norwegian-only audience.

Rune

I once met a guy (I'm not sure where he was from) whose name was spelled "Kjell", and pronounced, "Shell."

Cheers! Rich

Isaac Asimov once said that if the telephone had been invented in Germany, it'd be a "Fernsprecher."

I once saw that on the TV show "Batman"

"The Ghoti Oeufs company". Robin asked, "go-tie oofs?" but Batman corrected him. ;-) It meant "fish eggs", "oeufs" being French for "eggs"; and oddly enough, it was Catwoman's hideout.

Cheers! Rich

That -is- the German word for it, though the Germans I knew said "Telefon".

The story is that when the Kaiser was told about the new invention he asked, "But what is it called in German?"

jsw

On the short-lived TV reincarnation of "Mission Impossible" a female killer was tracked by her perfume, "Camion".

It sounds nice, but in French it's a big diesel truck.