Subject:
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Re: Silly Town Names
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.pun
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Date:
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Fri, 24 Nov 2000 08:43:45 GMT
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Viewed:
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817 times
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"James Powell" <wx732@freenet.victoria.bc.ca> writes:
> There used to be a Norwegian Hell as well.
There still is! Cities are seldom renamed over here...
There used to be funny sign at the Hell rail station:
"Hell -- Gods expedition"
This was written in old style Norwegian, and means something like
"goods handeling". The sign has since been removed and replaced with
something more to the style of modern Norwegian, and is probably not
as funny anymore...
People who are curious to why the Norwegian language has changed over
the years may note that Norway was under the Danish king during 14xx
to 1814, with the official language being Danish. Hence, the written
language was Danish until the 19th century. There were some reforms
during the late 19th and the early 20th century to bring the written
language closer to the language people actually speak. But the
problem is still that people speak a myriad of different dialects in
Norway, so it is kinda hard to decide on just how to write stuff. So
we have still got two different official written languages: Bokmål,
which is closer to Danish and Nynorsk which is intended to be the
least common denominator of the dialects. (And there is the language
of the Lapps, originally living in the northermost part of Norway,
which is also official. But only very few people know anything about
this language at all.)
Back to the subject of funny names of cities, I think "Nordagutu" is
kinda odd.
Fredrik
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