Danish and Norwegian are classified as North Germanic languages. They are closely related, especially in their written forms. However, plurals in the two languages sometimes differ.
Many plurals are identical in the two languages. Examples include blomster (flowers), dyr (animals) and ord (words). Nevertheless, many plurals are different.
Here is a list of ten plurals which differ in the two languages. The word on the left is Danish and the one on the right is Norwegian:
blade blader (leaves)
børn barn (children)
dage dager (days)
fugle fugler (birds)
hatte hatter (hats)
heste hester (horses)
hunde hunder (dogs)
huse hus (houses)
knive kniver (knives)
lande land (countries)
Many Danish plurals with the ending -e have the ending -er in Norwegian. This pattern occurs with plurals such as dage/dager and knive/kniver. A few Norwegian plurals which are the same in singular and plural have an -e in Danish. This is the case with hus/huse and land/lande. With the plurals børn/barn, the Norwegian plural is the same as the singular, but the Danish plural exhibits a change in the vowel.
Though Danish and Norwegian plurals are often identical, they can differ. Many Danish plurals with -e have -er in Norwegian. In Danish, -e is a common plural ending, but in Norwegian it is not. Plural endings in Norwegian are thus more regular than they are in Danish.
No comments:
Post a Comment