I still sometimes think about the guy in my lower secondary school English class in probably 2016 reading the infobox on the Wikipedia article for Tanzania, and saying out loud, "Official languages: none de jure??", pronouncing it in a heavy singsongy Norwegian accent like "NOO-nuh duh YEW-ruh??", apparently believing "None De Jure" to be the name of some sort of obscure African language rather than just meaning "no official language"

And then I remember that this was around the same time that the teacher asked what New York was named after, and I raised my hand and answered "the Dork of York". And then my soul goes nichijou_pencil_stab.mp4 for a bit

  • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]
    hexagon
    ·
    edit-2
    3 months ago

    'Mannschaft' corresponds to 'mannskap' in Norwegian.

    My dad had the complete set of Stewart Clark's Broken English books, and there's a ton of fun anecdotes like yours in those books, many of them based on Scandinavians' English mistakes. I should probably share a few of my favorites in a different thread.

    My brother and I grew up speaking both English and Norwegian, and so we've had plenty of our own language mix-ups during the course of our lives: it took me embarrassingly long to realize that 'Kingdom of Norway' is 'Kongeriket Norge' and not 'Kongeriket av Norge' (age 13~14), that 'eventuelt' non est 'eventually' but rather 'possibly' (age 15~16) and that 'smal' non est 'small' but rather 'narrow' (age 20~21). My brother on the other hand pretty recently revealed that he still thought that 'sad' was an English-language synonym of 'semen' or 'sperm', by conflating it with Norwegian 'sæd' (which is actually cognate with 'seed'), and this is a mistake that I swear both of us made as kids, but which I evidently grew out of much faster.

    My brother when he was a little kid also once said instead of "spider-like body", "eddercup-acty crap" (←edderkoppaktig kropp). What's interesting is that dialectal English does actually have the word 'attercop' for 'spider', and that Wiktionary asserts that 'crap' and 'kropp' actually are related. The semantic shift seems to be roughly like so: body → head of a plant → chaff → something discarded → poopydoodoo.

    • assyrian
      ·
      3 months ago

      I've always thought Norwegian was basically German with English grammar - there are so many cognates with German. there was a time when I was learning German and Norwegian at the same time and I'd get mixed up so much. I will never remember which language uses 'kan' and which uses 'kann'.

      • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]
        hexagon
        ·
        3 months ago

        I wouldn't say that Norwegian has English grammar, just that it has in some ways simpler grammar than German.