Lesson 01 - Nouns

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Introduction

Nouns (substantiv) are in Norwegian inflicted according to number, whether they are definite or indefinite and after their grammatical gender. Note that in Bokmål, which is the standard I will focus on, there are in theory three grammatical genders (feminine, masculine and neuter), but it is prefectly normal to inflect feminine nouns as if they were masculin, effectively blending the two genders into one.However, there are some feminie words that are usually given their traditional feminine inflection anyway, such as the words "jente" (girl), "ku" (cow) and "klokke" (clock). Note that adjectives and some other word classes as well must be in concord with the gender of the noun they are describing. In Bokmål, this concord only has two forms and not three (despite the fact that there are three genders), since the feminine and masculin concord forms always are identical. Again, this blends the two genders into one. When it comes to it, just remember that you are free to choose whether you want to use use three genders in actuality or not.

Note that in Nynorsk, this is not the case, in this standard there are three grammatical genders, end of discussion! Concord infliction has unique forms for both feminine and masculine.

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Gender

All nouns in Norwegian thus have a grammatical gender, either masculine, m (hannkjønn), feminine f (hunnkjønn) or neuter n (intetkjønn). Some words have, as in English and French, both a feminine and masculine form, but more often, there is a gender neutral form and a feminine form. For example. the word skuespiller means "actor", regardless of that actor's gender, while the feminine form "skuespillerinne" means "actress", thereby specifying that the actor is a woman. The neutral form is always used when it generally speaking of the person, the feminine only goes when it is known that the person is a woman.

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Gender-related suffixes

There are certain suffixes that can be used for some nouns representing persons or animals, to specify whether the person or animal is male or female. Note that the word that is modified by the suffix often is gender neutral, and therefore can be used regardless of whether the person or animal is male or female. Just because the person or animal is female or male does not mean you have to use the suffix-form.

-inne

The suffix -inne is used to denote feminine forms of a noun, especially feminine forms of words denoting high-ranking persons, for example nobles:

fyrste (m) (lord, prince) - fyrstinne (female lord, princess)

greve (m) (count, earl) - grevinne (countess)

hersker (m) (ruler) - herskerinne (female ruler)

-inne is also used for making female forms of nouns representing specific characteristics:

venn (m) (friend) - venninne (girlfriend, but only in the sense of a female friend)

elsker (m) (lover) - elskerinne(mistress, female lover)

frister (m) (tempter, one who tempts) - fristerinne (female tempter)

vert (m) (host) - vertinne (hostess)

A few animal names are also modified to a feminine form using -inne:

løve (m) (lion) - løvinne (lioness)

-ske

This suffix can be called the feminine variant of the suffix -er, which is used to denote names of professions and occupations from verbs and nouns or of the persons commiting the acts described by the verb or noun. For example, the verb "friste" (to tempt) becomes frister (tempter; one who commits the act of tempting), mord (n) (murder) becomes morder (m) (murderer; one who commits a murder) and holde (to hold) becomes holder (m) (a "holder"; one who commits the act of holding or keeping). Holder is mostly used in compound words, such as husholder (m) (housekeeper, hus, house + holder) and renholder (cleaner, ren, clean + holder).

-ske is as stated above the female variant of -er, thus denoting the same:

morder (m) (murderer, killer) - morderske (female murderer)

husholder (m) (housekeeper) - husholderske (female housekeeper)

syer (m) (one who's profession is sewing) - syerske (the person is a woman)

ledsager (m) (companion) - ledsagerske (female companion)

What about the gender?

You may have noticed that I have given the gender that each of the neutral forms belong to, but not done the same for the feminine suffix forms. This is because although they technically are feminine, it is rare to inflict them as such in Bokmål, perhaps even rarer than using feminine infliction on purely feminine words. It is of course up to you whether you wish to use masculin or feminine infliction or not, but remember that when writing a text and you have chosen which option to use, you must be consistent (unlike me when writing this text!). If you choose inflicting feminine nouns as masculine nouns, you must stick with that all the way through your text.

Exceptions

In some cases, the masculine and feminine forms are different, often because they differ etymologically:

- prins (m) (prince) - prinsesse (f) (princess)

-esse is not a suffix in the same was as the English equivalent -ess, and is not used often. Prinsesse is actually the only word I can think of that uses "esse".

- konge (m) (king) - dronning (f') (queen)

As you can see, the words are in no way similar to each other, because they are from different sources. Konge is from Old Norwegian konungr while dronning is from Old Norwegian dróttning. Dróttning was itself a feminine form of the noun dróttinn (lord, king). This word has by the way been retaken into the vocabularly as drott (still meaning lord or king), but it is only used in poetic cases. Other examples are:

- kvinne (f') (woman) - mann (m) (man)

These are the regular words for woman and mann. Despite what you might think, kvinne and the suffix -inne are not related. Kvinne derives from Old Norwegian kvenna which itself is the Old Norwegian noun kona (wife) declined in the genetive case. -inne on the other hand is from newer Old Norwegian -inna, which itself was loaned from Middle Low German. But there are more examples:

- bjørn (m) (bear) - binne (f) (female bear)

Again, these two words derive from two different words in Old Norwegian, but they are still as you may guess, akin to each other.

sau (m) (sheep) - søye (f) (female sheep)

The feminine form has in this case simply been derived from the gender neutral form, involving a transformation of the diphtong au into another: øy.

ku (f) (cow) - okse (m) (bull, ox)

Again, the two forms stem from two different origins.

Remember, this does not go for all nouns, many of them dosen't have a feminine form at all. It is mostly nouns denoting persons or animals that can be given female variants. In those cases where there are no parallell feminine/masculine form, the word is either gender-neutral or still haven't been given an official masculine/feminine.

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Articles

Articles are words that describe the number of a noun and whether it is definite or not. In languages with grammatical genders, the articles changes depending on the gender of the noun. In English, the articles are a/an for singular indefinite, the for singular definite, some (optional) for plural indefinite and the for plural definite. In Norwegian, the article changes depending on the gender of the noun. The articles are:

- En - singular indefinite masculine (a/an)

- Ei - singular indefinite feminine (a/an)

Due to the fact that you are allowed to use masculin infliction on feminine words, the use of ei in front of feminine words is optional. If you choose to use three genders, then ei must be utilised for feminine nouns, if you choose two genders (common and neuter), you can choose between en and ei. As mentioned before, this is not an option in Nynorsk.

When a noun is inflicted in the plural, the article is put after the word instead of before it, as you will see later. There are articles that can be put before the noun in the plural definite, but they are often demonstrative and are added in addition to the article placed after the noun. You will learn about them later.

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Infliction

As I have mentioned, nouns are inflicted in number, definite/indefinite and after their gender. There are no real thumb rule (at least none that I know of) that can be applied to guess what gender a noun has, every rule I can think of has far too many exceptions for me to recommend. The best way is just to memorise the gender of every word, this is partiuclarly important for English-speakers I think, since English doesn't have grammatical genders. One rule that does work is that words that have a "biological" gender, for example the word for woman, girl, boy, man and such, have the same grammatical gender as their biological one. Loanwords are often masculine, but quite a few are also given neuter; there are no specific rules for this.

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Feminine

In Bokmål, the inflectional pattern for feminine nouns is pretty straight forward, with few exceptions (unlike Nynorsk). I'll use the word "jente" (girl) as an example:

NOTE: The upper case letters are the inflectional endings

Ei jente (singular indefinite: a girl) - jentA (singular definite: the girl) - jenteR (plural indefinite: girls) - jenteNE (plural definite: the girls)

Keep in mind that all feminine nouns can be inflicted as if they were masculine, if you wish to do so:

En jente (singular indefinite: a girl) - jenteN (singular definite: the girl) - jenteR (plural indefinite: girls) - jenteNE (plural definite: the girls)

As you can see, the differences between the two patterns are minimal in Bokmål, but the form "jenten" is very rarely used in my area (we find it pretty weird, and many of my friends discard it as an error, though it is not). On the other hand, this form is used in some dialects, like the one in Bergen, where only two genders (masculine and common) exist. As you can see, the word ending changes throughout the infliction, from -a to -r and -ne. This is the inflectional pattern and it has very few exceptions (in Bokmål that is). I mentioned that the plural article is put after the noun instead of before it. -a, -r/-er and -ene/-ne are those articles. Feminine nouns can be grouped in two groups, depending on whether they have one or more syllables. I'll call these categories f1 and f2 (per the system used in dictionaries).

(one syllable) f1) Ei bru/bro (a bridge) - bruA/broA (the bridge) - bruER/broER (bridges) - bruENE/broENE (the bridges)

(two or more syllables) f2) Ei jente (a girl) - jentA (the girl) - jenteR (girls) - jenteNE (the girls)

(To find out how many syllables there are, just say the word out loud while counting the stops on your fingers. For example, the word "sister" has two syllables, sis (one finger)-ter (two fingers).)

As you can see, the f1 pattern is -a, -er and -ene, while f2 is -a, -r and -ne.

Remember that you at any time can replace the feminine infliction with the masculine. Since the masculine and feminine inflectional patterns are identical except for in singular definite (-a vs. -en), this in reality involves the removal of the -a in singular definite and replacing it with -(e)n (for example: klokkA <----> klokkeN).

It is more usual in Standard East Norwegian (the oral language that mostly resembles Bokmål, both in structure and pronunciation) to mix the masculine and feminine inflectional patterns, at least as far as the tiny differences between the patterns in Bokmål can allow:

En jente (a girl) - jentA (the girl) - jenteR (girls) - jenteNE (the girls)

As you can see, the masculine article for singular indefinite is used ("en"), despite the feminine inflection being applied the for singular definite (-a). This is also allowed in written Bokmål, but not in Nynorsk (as all three genders are "mandatory").

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Masculine

The inflection of masculine nouns can be placed in three categories, I'll call them m1, m2 and m3 (per the system used in my dictionary).

M1

(words ending in a consonant): En gutt (a boy) - guttEN (the boy) - guttER (boys) - guttENE (the boys) (words ending in a consonant)

(words not ending in a vowel): En bakke (a hill, a slope, ground, earth) - bakkeN (the hill, the slope, the ground) - bakkeR (hills, slopes) - bakkeNE (the hills, the slopes)

You may wonder why I haven't written "grounds/earths" and "the grounds/earths" in the brackets. That's because the word "bakke" only means "ground/earth" in singular, as in "he was slammed to the ground". You cannot say "slammed to the grounds" and the same goes for Norwegian. Therefore you can say "legge noen i bakkeN" ("knock somebody down", literally "lay someone in the ground") but not "legge noen i bakkeNE" ("lay someone in the grounds").

m2) En lærer (a teacher) - lærerEN (the teacher) - lærerE (teachers) - lærerNE

m3) En bever (a beaver) - beverEN (the beaver) - beverE/bevre(r) (beavers) - beverNE*/bevrene (beavers)

• the pronunciation changes in the form "beverne" and is articulated as "bevÆrne" (capital letter indicates where the stress lies)

Sample words

- Bil (m1) = car

- Stol (m1) = chair

- Pumpe (m1) = pump

- *Maskin (m1) = machine

- Hund (m1) = dog, hound

- Katt (m1) = cat

- Hatt (m1) = hat

- Herre (m1) = gentleman, lord/Lord (religion), master

- **Verden (m1) = world, the world

- Gnager (m2) = rodent

- Hersker (m2) = ruler

- Frister (m2) = tempter

- Morder (m2) = murderer

- Feber (m3) = fever

The word "maskin" is pronounced more or less identical to the English equivalent

"verden" can be used in singular indefinite in the same sense as English "the world", because the world originally was the singular definite inflection of an Old Norse equivalent. You can see this in Nynorsk, where the word for "world" is "verd" and not "verden".

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Neuter

Coming soon

For learning Norwegian Category Uncategorized Level Unspecified Second language English Created May 24, 2008 11:35 Views 1111 Share:

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