(or anyone else who sees this and speaks Norwegian)
I've been wondering about this for the past couple of months. My father, who died in August, used to say as a greeting something that sounds like "Osten Stodder Til." I guess I never got around to asking him what it meant--I always took it as "How are you doing?" or "Good to see you" or something like that. It was what he greeted us with when he woke up in the hospital on the last morning of his life.
Anyway, I haven't found the phrase in any of my perfunctory googling for basic Norwegian expressions.
My mother told me, which I don't think I ever knew, that Dad spoke a dialect that was heavily influenced by Danish, and that it had been discouraged and pretty well stamped out by the government in favor of a purer Norwegian. He was not a native speaker but it was his first language; he was born and raised in a Scandinavian section of Brooklyn and he lived in Norway for about a year as a teenager, and was part of a Norwegian battalion during WWII.
Can you tell me correct spelling and meaning of the phrase above, and/or shed any light on the Danish/Norwegian dialect? His family was from the Oslo area.
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
The phrase would be "Åssen står det til?", literally "How does it stand [with you]?" or idiomatically "How are you doing?" You would probably not find the word 'åssen' in any but a quite skilled Google search, as it is pure Oslo dialect; the official spelling is 'hvordan' - I myself, being a speaker of Bergen dialect, would say 'kordan' or 'koss'.
Your mother was exaggerating the stamping out of the Danish-influenced languages, although I understand that the Norwegian spoken by the Norwegian-American community is rather archaic. The language issue in Norway is a rather complex one; the Wiki has a reasonable history. Short form, though, is that there are two written forms, and any number of spoken forms, some of which border on mutual incomprehensibility. (Consider the word 'I', which may be pronounced (phonetically) 'yay', 'eg', 'ee', 'ae' among others.) Both written forms have been periodically updated, bringing them closer together and also taking up any new loan words and usages. Government offices are obliged to reply in the form they are addressed in, and the state TV stations are obliged to have 25% of their content be in the dialect-based version.
The language reforms have no doubt brought the modern Bokmål (Danish-influenced version) quite a bit away from what was official when your family emigrated, but there's certainly not been any stamping out.
Posted by Uprooted (Member # 8353) on :
Thanks, KoM, that's interesting and helpful. I'll go read the Wiki article now.
Posted by Uprooted (Member # 8353) on :
Oh, and someone who met my Dad after living in Norway for a few years remarked to me, "Your father speaks Norwegian with a New York accent."
"Takk for maten" was another phrase I grew up with, but I know what that one means.
Y'know, maybe I can ask you something else. My Norwegian grandmother had this exclamation of shock or disapproval whenever she heard something bad: She would say something that sounded like "Nemen!"
I asked my dad what it meant but he never had a satisfactory answer for me. Do you?
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
Probably "Nei, men!", literally "No, but!" So something like "No, but seriously now, you cannot mean this!" Or short for "Nei, men hør nå her", that is, "No, but listen!".
Posted by Uprooted (Member # 8353) on :
Thanks, the former sounds about right. Her English was cute: "I have to throw out the yunk." Those memories are about the extent of my Norwegian heritage--well, along with my name and a taste for sandkakke and gjetost! (but never fiskeboller, one of my father's favorites . . . blecchh)
Posted by ginette (Member # 852) on :
Interesting:)
I am living in Denmark at the moment, I asked here and of course King of Men is right. I am still learning the Danish language, but it is very hard. I can read it, but as soon as they start talking, I am lost. The dialect from up here in the north sounds for example completely different from the Danish you hear on TV.
And I found out that somehow our brains must be used to hear certain small differences in our own language, while you can't hear similar differences in a foreign language. For example, I can't hear the difference between the word 'ud' which is pronounced with a soft 'd' at the end, that sounds to me just like an 'l', and the word 'ul'. For a Dane it is a clear difference. So I asked a Dane whether he could hear the difference between the Dutch word 'scheef' and the Dutch word 'schreef', but he couldn't.