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Norwegian written and pronounced language was actually changed because one digit was added to phone numbers. Here is the long story: Starting after World War T

by vages 3y ago

Norwegian written and pronounced language was actually changed because one digit was added to phone numbers. Here is the long story: Starting after World War Two, the government made an attempt at _merging_ the two written languages. The imagined outcome was named “Samnorsk” (unified Norwegian), led by Språknemnda (The Language committee). The work mainly consisted of changing the grammar of certain words in the bokmål. School textbooks would be rewritten with only the new grammar. Sometimes with comical results, as rhyming words in children’s would no lenger rhyme («Mons er pen./ Han er ren -> rein.») The attempt ultimately failed, and in 1972 Språknemda became Språkrådet (The language council), who maintain the official rules for written Norwegian and who published this article. Merging the two written languages was part of the council’s long term goals until 2002, when it was removed from its mandate. What the government did succeed at was changing the pronunciation of numbers from 20 to 99. It was changed from how the Germans do it (“two and forty”) to how the English do (“forty two”). This was architected by the head of the telephone bureau in 1949, as an error reduction mechanism: When the phone number length increased from 5 to 6 digits, the number of wrongly dialed numbers increased along with it. Internal research at the bureau showed that people would make fewer errors when digits were consistently read from right to left. Further reading (in Norwegian): - https://snl.no/samnorsk https://snl.no/samnorsk - https://snl.no/den_nye_tellemåten https://snl.no/den_nye_tellemåten

vidarh 3y ago
The numbers switch was slow, though. My parents started school after the change was officially made in the 50's and would have learned the new forms in school, but still used the old form enough in the late 70's and 80's that I picked up a preference for it from them, and you still find people of my generation (I'm born in '75) using the old forms pretty often, if less now than when I was younger. (If anyone here wonders if this is the same "Samnorsk" as in Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep": It is. For people who know Norwegian, Vinge's books have several Norwegian-inspired terms. E.g. "Nyjora" is "new earth".)
- semi-extrinsic 3y ago
  I think the old style of pronouncing numbers still lives on, especially for two-digit numbers and in certain dialects/sociolects. I certainly use it without making conscious effort, and I'm a 90s kid. My children again understand the system, but they rarely use it.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    I mean, there are many other vestigial pieces that will hang in there for a very long time, but see elsewhere - I searched the National Library, and you're absolutely right that it's still around to a limited extent, but the decline in written use at least has been fairly steep.
- berkes 3y ago
  > The numbers switch was slow, though. 50 years is hardly "slow" on a scale of language reform. The number-systems stem from at least proto-germanic languages, millenia of small changes.
sakjur 3y ago
I think the right to left should be left to right in that last sentence? I was briefly confused by that and ended up reading your links (takk!) Danish still use a somewhat complex infix system for reading numbers (five and half fours is 75), and I find that very confusing as a Swede who didn’t grow up with it.
- kombookcha 3y ago
  Confusingly, Danish counting is also a mix of old norse counting systems (based on tens) and medieval ones (based on twenty) for maximum chaos. For instance the word for 40, fyrretyve (sounds like four-twenty), is derived from old norse fyritiughu, "four tens". It sounds like it SHOULD mean 80! But 80 is firs, or firsindstyve - four twenties.
- vages 3y ago
  My mistake. Can’t correct it now, because the edit period is over.
- Symbiote 3y ago
  Danish people no longer say the "times twenty" parts of their numbers, which makes it more confusing to foreigners. 75 femoghalvfjerds used to be spoken as femoghalffjerdsindstyve, fem og half-fjerd-sinds-tyve¹, five and half-fourth-times-twenty. The longer form is still used for ordinal numbers. 75th is femoghalffjerdsindstyvende. French speakers will also recognise this system for numbers 80-99. 85 is quatre-vingt-cinq, four-twenties-five. ¹ People not used to compound words, like English speakers, will appreciate me writing it like this.
  - zilti 3y ago
    I don't get the 75. How does it work? What is a half fourth time?
    - Symbiote 3y ago
      Sorry, I should have explained that better. It's half of the fourth twenty — meaning all of the first, second and third twenties, but only half of the fourth one. 20 + 20 + 20 + ½×20 = 70. And for the 75, it's just "five and" before all that. Many native Danish speakers learn the abbreviated words as young children, and don't generally think about their numbers this way, if they're even aware of it. (Much as a native English speaker might not think of 'thirteen' as 'three-ten'.) For 60 and 80, the normal, abbreviated form is very short: "tres" and "firs" (full form: "tresindstyve", "firsindstyve"). For foreigners, these sound rather like something to do with three and four — as they are! — which causes much more difficulty than expected when learning basic numbers. ("Much more difficulty than expected" is the general experience when learning Danish as a second language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI5DPt3Ge_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI5DPt3Ge_s)
The_Colonel 3y ago
> This was architected by the head of the telephone bureau in 1949, as an error reduction mechanism I find it fascinating that the telephone bureau was powerful enough to initiate such language change. Imagine happening this today. But this reminds me of the fact that in Czech we have both counting systems as well. The forward (english) counting is the standard, but the backward (german) is quite commonly used informally as well (it also has a certain poetic quality). Learning German was for me a revelation of how much influence German had on the Czech language. There are of course loanwords (mostly in the dying dialects), but there's also a less obvious structural influence. My favorite demonstration of this is the verb "vorstellen" - it has several meanings (physically put sth. forward, introduce, present, imagine). It turns out Czech has a fully native word (not a loanword) "představit" with an identical set of meanings and identical structure - "vor" is "před", "stellen" is "stavit". There are many words like that, and the counting system is likely another such "structural" influence. I'm fully convinced that German is easier to learn for Czech speakers as opposed to English speakers, even though it's across language families. It's a language continuum after all ...
- bjoli 3y ago
  It was a different time as well. There was one central resource for phone-related things and the spirit of the time was very much a bureaucratic efficient one. The idea was that you could make the society better and more efficient, often top down. In Sweden there was even a standardisation of kitchens made by a government agency. Everything from height of the counters to placement. It wasn't always followed, but it did shape things. This was done at a time when the Swedish population hade a staggering increase in housing standards due mostly to government policy. The houses might not be very highly regarded today (mostly because the areas are considered bad) but they are solidly built and are usually very practical with lots of storage in the right places. In Sweden we had the "du"-reform where we stopped referring to people either by their title or surname and the plural-you ("ni"). Instead we started using singular you ("du") and first name. This was started at a government agency and spread quickly through society. There was actually a gender neutral pronoun introduced recently that is getting used more often. In addition to "han" and "hon" (he and she) we now have "hen". Depending on language situation it is actually very handy, and you can actually see it used in large newspapers or semi-official documents.
vodkapump 3y ago
> What the government did succeed at was changing the pronunciation of numbers from 20 to 99. It was changed from how the Germans do it (“two and forty”) to how the English do (“forty two”). Yet almost every single person I speak with every day here outside of people from the Oslo region say it the "two and forty" way. Though, that probably still means most people say it the "forty two" way.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Tor3 3y ago
The "official" way of pronouncing numbers was indeed changed for that reason (NB: That was back when there were still phone central operators and you were supposed to tell them the number) However - the "old" way ("two and forty") is alive and well, very much so by the oldest generation of course, but among much younger people too. Most people alive use both ways - for some stuff it's simply more natural or easier to say "fem-og-tredve" than "tretti-fem".
boxed 3y ago
I wish for a bigger revolution in Swedish. It has been rather painful to experience how hard it is for my children to learn to do simple addition in their heads because the language is broken. It's easier to add 30 and 40 in your head for children, than it is to add 13 and 2! Because it's "3 ten and 4 ten" vs "<special word> and 2". The special word being "thirteen". The language is irregular for numbers up to 29 as 20 has a special word. We should change 10, 20, 30, 40 to "etti, tvåti, treti, fyrti". It would be so much better!
- Tor3 3y ago
  For some reason many languages use an irregular system for numbers. Well, reasons are historical.. things may have made more sense in (e.g.) Old Norse than modern Danish, for example. Japanese though.. now that's regular. One, two, three, .. nine, ten, ten-one, ten-two,.. ten-eight, ten-nine, two-ten, two-ten-one.. and so on. And then 'hundred', and continue the same way. to-hundred-to-ten-five (225). The only stumble is when you pass 10000, as from then on the grouping is in tens of thousands, not in thousands. But with that the only issue there's only one struggle to master (for learners coming from a culture which groups in thousands). Anecdotally, Japanese children learn to do arithmetic quicker than children from (e.g.) Sweden. But I've been unable to find real scientific confirmation of this.
  - Ingaz 3y ago
    I think every natural language is irregular when it comes to numbers. And about Japanese: you forgot about counters for men, animals, flat things and so on. You have ichi-ippiku-ippon-hitory - issai And absolutely fascinating "system" for "years old" - everything starts with -sai but 20 years is "hatachi"!
    - boxed 3y ago
      > I think every natural language is irregular when it comes to numbers. But.. it's not. Japanese is not. Just because it's not metric with grouping doesn't mean it's irregular.
mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
The failed samnorsk reform did have a silver lining. Around high school I figured out that because of it, a shocking amount of Nynorsk grammar was secretly optional and the Bokmål version was very often valid Nynorsk. So I started just writing my essays in Bokmål and then fixing the errors in post, so to speak. Initially my teacher tried to fail me for this, but she lost that battle. I vehemently hate Nynorsk, or at least the fact that it's supposed to be "equal" to bokmål. It was a neat idea and all, but I honestly think it should only be seen as an archaic language used for poetry and literature. And only taught to students who want to delve deeper into that, not forced onto you starting in 8th grade.
- mailund 3y ago
  I used the same approach! I essentially had a list of everything I should search and replace in the document (e.g. search for singular nouns ending in -en and see if they should be replaced by -a), and all the weird quirks that I needed to pay special attention to. As soon I was finished writing in bokmål, I followed the steps to "transpile" the text into nynorsk! I was able to go from almost failing to getting a decent grade back in the days using this approach.
- unixhero 3y ago
  Nynorsk kept me away from becoming a fighter pilot
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
    That makes me so angry. The Norwegian school system is so, so inflexible and it ruins many lives each year. For me, the reason I was never allowed to set foot in a university was German, PE, and Norwegian literature. I was suffering from severe health issues and I didn't have the energy to do all the subjects I had no interest in. So I poured my focus into the subjects I enjoyed and/or were relevant to my future plans(biology, calc, English, physics, history). I generally nailed those subjects. But because I failed German, and almost never showed up for PE, I was denied the opportunity to follow my dream and study biology. Part of the problem is also the very inflexible admission requirements for Norwegian universities.

by vages 3y ago

vidarh 3y ago

The numbers switch was slow, though. My parents started school after the change was officially made in the 50's and would have learned the new forms in school, but still used the old form enough in the late 70's and 80's that I picked up a preference for it from them, and you still find people of my generation (I'm born in '75) using the old forms pretty often, if less now than when I was younger. (If anyone here wonders if this is the same "Samnorsk" as in Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep": It is. For people who know Norwegian, Vinge's books have several Norwegian-inspired terms. E.g. "Nyjora" is "new earth".)

semi-extrinsic 3y ago
I think the old style of pronouncing numbers still lives on, especially for two-digit numbers and in certain dialects/sociolects. I certainly use it without making conscious effort, and I'm a 90s kid. My children again understand the system, but they rarely use it.
- vidarh 3y ago
  I mean, there are many other vestigial pieces that will hang in there for a very long time, but see elsewhere - I searched the National Library, and you're absolutely right that it's still around to a limited extent, but the decline in written use at least has been fairly steep.
berkes 3y ago
> The numbers switch was slow, though. 50 years is hardly "slow" on a scale of language reform. The number-systems stem from at least proto-germanic languages, millenia of small changes.

sakjur 3y ago

I think the right to left should be left to right in that last sentence? I was briefly confused by that and ended up reading your links (takk!) Danish still use a somewhat complex infix system for reading numbers (five and half fours is 75), and I find that very confusing as a Swede who didn’t grow up with it.

kombookcha 3y ago
Confusingly, Danish counting is also a mix of old norse counting systems (based on tens) and medieval ones (based on twenty) for maximum chaos. For instance the word for 40, fyrretyve (sounds like four-twenty), is derived from old norse fyritiughu, "four tens". It sounds like it SHOULD mean 80! But 80 is firs, or firsindstyve - four twenties.
vages 3y ago
My mistake. Can’t correct it now, because the edit period is over.
Symbiote 3y ago
Danish people no longer say the "times twenty" parts of their numbers, which makes it more confusing to foreigners. 75 femoghalvfjerds used to be spoken as femoghalffjerdsindstyve, fem og half-fjerd-sinds-tyve¹, five and half-fourth-times-twenty. The longer form is still used for ordinal numbers. 75th is femoghalffjerdsindstyvende. French speakers will also recognise this system for numbers 80-99. 85 is quatre-vingt-cinq, four-twenties-five. ¹ People not used to compound words, like English speakers, will appreciate me writing it like this.
- zilti 3y ago
  I don't get the 75. How does it work? What is a half fourth time?
  - Symbiote 3y ago
    Sorry, I should have explained that better. It's half of the fourth twenty — meaning all of the first, second and third twenties, but only half of the fourth one. 20 + 20 + 20 + ½×20 = 70. And for the 75, it's just "five and" before all that. Many native Danish speakers learn the abbreviated words as young children, and don't generally think about their numbers this way, if they're even aware of it. (Much as a native English speaker might not think of 'thirteen' as 'three-ten'.) For 60 and 80, the normal, abbreviated form is very short: "tres" and "firs" (full form: "tresindstyve", "firsindstyve"). For foreigners, these sound rather like something to do with three and four — as they are! — which causes much more difficulty than expected when learning basic numbers. ("Much more difficulty than expected" is the general experience when learning Danish as a second language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI5DPt3Ge_s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI5DPt3Ge_s)

The_Colonel 3y ago

> This was architected by the head of the telephone bureau in 1949, as an error reduction mechanism I find it fascinating that the telephone bureau was powerful enough to initiate such language change. Imagine happening this today. But this reminds me of the fact that in Czech we have both counting systems as well. The forward (english) counting is the standard, but the backward (german) is quite commonly used informally as well (it also has a certain poetic quality). Learning German was for me a revelation of how much influence German had on the Czech language. There are of course loanwords (mostly in the dying dialects), but there's also a less obvious structural influence. My favorite demonstration of this is the verb "vorstellen" - it has several meanings (physically put sth. forward, introduce, present, imagine). It turns out Czech has a fully native word (not a loanword) "představit" with an identical set of meanings and identical structure - "vor" is "před", "stellen" is "stavit". There are many words like that, and the counting system is likely another such "structural" influence. I'm fully convinced that German is easier to learn for Czech speakers as opposed to English speakers, even though it's across language families. It's a language continuum after all ...

bjoli 3y ago
It was a different time as well. There was one central resource for phone-related things and the spirit of the time was very much a bureaucratic efficient one. The idea was that you could make the society better and more efficient, often top down. In Sweden there was even a standardisation of kitchens made by a government agency. Everything from height of the counters to placement. It wasn't always followed, but it did shape things. This was done at a time when the Swedish population hade a staggering increase in housing standards due mostly to government policy. The houses might not be very highly regarded today (mostly because the areas are considered bad) but they are solidly built and are usually very practical with lots of storage in the right places. In Sweden we had the "du"-reform where we stopped referring to people either by their title or surname and the plural-you ("ni"). Instead we started using singular you ("du") and first name. This was started at a government agency and spread quickly through society. There was actually a gender neutral pronoun introduced recently that is getting used more often. In addition to "han" and "hon" (he and she) we now have "hen". Depending on language situation it is actually very handy, and you can actually see it used in large newspapers or semi-official documents.

vodkapump 3y ago

> What the government did succeed at was changing the pronunciation of numbers from 20 to 99. It was changed from how the Germans do it (“two and forty”) to how the English do (“forty two”). Yet almost every single person I speak with every day here outside of people from the Oslo region say it the "two and forty" way. Though, that probably still means most people say it the "forty two" way.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

Tor3 3y ago

The "official" way of pronouncing numbers was indeed changed for that reason (NB: That was back when there were still phone central operators and you were supposed to tell them the number) However - the "old" way ("two and forty") is alive and well, very much so by the oldest generation of course, but among much younger people too. Most people alive use both ways - for some stuff it's simply more natural or easier to say "fem-og-tredve" than "tretti-fem".

boxed 3y ago

I wish for a bigger revolution in Swedish. It has been rather painful to experience how hard it is for my children to learn to do simple addition in their heads because the language is broken. It's easier to add 30 and 40 in your head for children, than it is to add 13 and 2! Because it's "3 ten and 4 ten" vs "<special word> and 2". The special word being "thirteen". The language is irregular for numbers up to 29 as 20 has a special word. We should change 10, 20, 30, 40 to "etti, tvåti, treti, fyrti". It would be so much better!

Tor3 3y ago
For some reason many languages use an irregular system for numbers. Well, reasons are historical.. things may have made more sense in (e.g.) Old Norse than modern Danish, for example. Japanese though.. now that's regular. One, two, three, .. nine, ten, ten-one, ten-two,.. ten-eight, ten-nine, two-ten, two-ten-one.. and so on. And then 'hundred', and continue the same way. to-hundred-to-ten-five (225). The only stumble is when you pass 10000, as from then on the grouping is in tens of thousands, not in thousands. But with that the only issue there's only one struggle to master (for learners coming from a culture which groups in thousands). Anecdotally, Japanese children learn to do arithmetic quicker than children from (e.g.) Sweden. But I've been unable to find real scientific confirmation of this.
- Ingaz 3y ago
  I think every natural language is irregular when it comes to numbers. And about Japanese: you forgot about counters for men, animals, flat things and so on. You have ichi-ippiku-ippon-hitory - issai And absolutely fascinating "system" for "years old" - everything starts with -sai but 20 years is "hatachi"!
  - boxed 3y ago
    > I think every natural language is irregular when it comes to numbers. But.. it's not. Japanese is not. Just because it's not metric with grouping doesn't mean it's irregular.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago

The failed samnorsk reform did have a silver lining. Around high school I figured out that because of it, a shocking amount of Nynorsk grammar was secretly optional and the Bokmål version was very often valid Nynorsk. So I started just writing my essays in Bokmål and then fixing the errors in post, so to speak. Initially my teacher tried to fail me for this, but she lost that battle. I vehemently hate Nynorsk, or at least the fact that it's supposed to be "equal" to bokmål. It was a neat idea and all, but I honestly think it should only be seen as an archaic language used for poetry and literature. And only taught to students who want to delve deeper into that, not forced onto you starting in 8th grade.

mailund 3y ago
I used the same approach! I essentially had a list of everything I should search and replace in the document (e.g. search for singular nouns ending in -en and see if they should be replaced by -a), and all the weird quirks that I needed to pay special attention to. As soon I was finished writing in bokmål, I followed the steps to "transpile" the text into nynorsk! I was able to go from almost failing to getting a decent grade back in the days using this approach.
unixhero 3y ago
Nynorsk kept me away from becoming a fighter pilot
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
  That makes me so angry. The Norwegian school system is so, so inflexible and it ruins many lives each year. For me, the reason I was never allowed to set foot in a university was German, PE, and Norwegian literature. I was suffering from severe health issues and I didn't have the energy to do all the subjects I had no interest in. So I poured my focus into the subjects I enjoyed and/or were relevant to my future plans(biology, calc, English, physics, history). I generally nailed those subjects. But because I failed German, and almost never showed up for PE, I was denied the opportunity to follow my dream and study biology. Part of the problem is also the very inflexible admission requirements for Norwegian universities.