I drove Lise to work at the hospital this morning at 7am. There is literally no parking for employees available. We don't need to share the car, although it snowed quite heavily last night. We maybe have 1/4" on the ground this morning. Of course every square centimeter has been thoroughly salted around here. It is so hilly that icy sidewalks are extra-dangerous.
One interesting aspect about learning a foreign language is how it reminds me how arbitrary language is. I drove Lise to the sykehus, which literally translated means "sick house." Of course it is the hospital- but what does hospital actually mean? I guess hospital probably means "sick house." But there are no other references in English, until you consider "hospitality" and related words- which have nothing to do with being ill- or worst of all, "hospice"- for when people are hopelessly ill. Fortunately, the other part of the word where Lise works is psykiatrisk, which requires no further explanation. Norwegian nicely dispenses with the letter C for any hard K sounds- which greatly simplifies life. Now if only they would eradicate noun genders and dialekter, all would be well. By the way, the -er ending means plural, so they can use an s without an apostrophy to connote possessive. It is all rather handy, except that nobody ever fully finishes pronouncing their words anyway, so I can never really tell if a noun is plural or not.
My favorite word in Norwegian is små dyrlege- which means "small animal doctor." This is much more practical that our use of the word veternarian- which is not very descriptive. Our cats see a små dyrlege down the street. Lise's father uses a regular dyrlege for the farm animals, which are not small. Norway doesn't have an indigenous large animals, like elephants, that require regular medical care, so they don't really have a word for "large animal doctor." Speaking of large animals, when we were walking downtown last week, I noticed a sign at the fish market that they sell hval- which is a word designed to fool foreigners. Hval is actually whale. They sell the stuff in broad daylight- on the street. While legal, I have never actually seen anyone serve it.
Some words cause confusion because I think I know what they mean. I was out biking in the middle of nowhere when I stumbled upon a hundepensjonat. Now pensjon actually does mean "pension" in some cases, and hund definitely means "dog." However, the two words combined refers to a "dog kennel." While life is very good here, there are no retirement programs for dogs in Norway.
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1 comment:
Language is so arbritary and yet there are those who want to insist on it being a certain way and for it to remain static, which is impossible as you can't really legislate people to use it in just one certain way, but we try somewhat with grammar classes I suppose.
German also uses a better or more accurate appelation for what we in English call a hospital, krankenhaus, which literally, means, sick (kranken) house (haus). That language also uses the noun gender and it's variations for the plural, for instance, das Kinder, is "child", die kinder, is "children"; der Vater is "father" and die Vater is "fathers". It would be much simpler to drop the gender stuff and add an "s" to make anything plural in my mind.
I'll be reviewing some of your previous blogs today so you might want to look back for some other commentary.
LA
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