I'm not sure what forum this should be under so I'm posting it here I hope you don't mind.
I have several questions really. All centred around the commonly held belief in the Lake District (in England) that the local dialect in its purest form is more easily understood by Norwegian speakers than English speakers or even those who speak the Yorkshire dialect. (Yorkshire claims to get many of its words from Danish, and a Cumbrian wouldn't understand above half of them, despite the seeming similarities to the outsider, but perhaps that's just a matter of accents! ;-) )
First of all, when I asked my Norwegian friend to test out this theory for me by comparing different words from our respective languages he told me that there are two kinds of Norwegian, almost entirely different languages, one spoken around Oslo, and the other spoken in the far north on the coast where he comes from. Is this true? I haven't found any other evidence of it. Is he just refering to Norwegian and say a form of Swedish, which is often used all over Scandanavia? (I know many Finnish people speak Swedish as their first language and few now know more than a handful of words in Suomi). Or are there really two different languages with perhaps many commonalities - much as there used to be Northern English and Southern English before Modern English emerged and unified them over the past few centuries?
His main examples were for the different words for river and hill. He said where he comes from in the north, river is bekk and hill is fjell, wheras in the south of Norway hill is berg and, well I can't remember what he said for river but it didn't sound anything like bekk!
Of course I know that fell, beck, tarn, force and dale all have their counterparts in Norwegian, does anyone know of any other words?
I know of someone who was holidaying in Norway and overheard someone in a pub saying "yam gang wam" which is exactly how he would say "I'm going home" in Cumbrian, though to be honest, it sounds a lot like a Brummie (Birmingham) accent to me, as the locals round here say 'yam' rather than 'I'm' and 'wam' is a standard term for 'home' in the West Midlands too. Now, there is this theory that the place furthest from the capital and furthest from any other borders (or coastline) is the place where the accent/dialect remains the most pure and so Birmingham would be the place where the English spoken most closely resembles that of the Middle-English speaker. So does that mean that these words that Cumbrians hold on so tight to as distinctly Cumbrian and of Old Norwegian origin are in fact just another example of the way that Norse and other Germanic languages fed into the general English mix, all over the country, or are they distinct to that particular northern area of Britain?
I have several questions really. All centred around the commonly held belief in the Lake District (in England) that the local dialect in its purest form is more easily understood by Norwegian speakers than English speakers or even those who speak the Yorkshire dialect. (Yorkshire claims to get many of its words from Danish, and a Cumbrian wouldn't understand above half of them, despite the seeming similarities to the outsider, but perhaps that's just a matter of accents! ;-) )
First of all, when I asked my Norwegian friend to test out this theory for me by comparing different words from our respective languages he told me that there are two kinds of Norwegian, almost entirely different languages, one spoken around Oslo, and the other spoken in the far north on the coast where he comes from. Is this true? I haven't found any other evidence of it. Is he just refering to Norwegian and say a form of Swedish, which is often used all over Scandanavia? (I know many Finnish people speak Swedish as their first language and few now know more than a handful of words in Suomi). Or are there really two different languages with perhaps many commonalities - much as there used to be Northern English and Southern English before Modern English emerged and unified them over the past few centuries?
His main examples were for the different words for river and hill. He said where he comes from in the north, river is bekk and hill is fjell, wheras in the south of Norway hill is berg and, well I can't remember what he said for river but it didn't sound anything like bekk!
Of course I know that fell, beck, tarn, force and dale all have their counterparts in Norwegian, does anyone know of any other words?
I know of someone who was holidaying in Norway and overheard someone in a pub saying "yam gang wam" which is exactly how he would say "I'm going home" in Cumbrian, though to be honest, it sounds a lot like a Brummie (Birmingham) accent to me, as the locals round here say 'yam' rather than 'I'm' and 'wam' is a standard term for 'home' in the West Midlands too. Now, there is this theory that the place furthest from the capital and furthest from any other borders (or coastline) is the place where the accent/dialect remains the most pure and so Birmingham would be the place where the English spoken most closely resembles that of the Middle-English speaker. So does that mean that these words that Cumbrians hold on so tight to as distinctly Cumbrian and of Old Norwegian origin are in fact just another example of the way that Norse and other Germanic languages fed into the general English mix, all over the country, or are they distinct to that particular northern area of Britain?