Helen FieldsScience Writer

The new Dictionary of the Week is one I’ve had longer than most of my other dictionaries: Lingua Engelsk-norsk norsk-engelsk Ordbok for videregående skole. If you don’t read Norwegian, and hardly anyone does, let me help you: Lingua English-Norwegian Norwegian-English Dictionary for Upper Secondary School.

The stickers say “Allowed to use on the exam!” and “Help with problem words” and “Mini-grammar.” Perhaps you can tell – this Norwegian dictionary is intended for use by Norwegians. I bought it in the university bookstore at the University of Oslo a few weeks after I graduated from college. I believe it was even shrink-wrapped, so I couldn’t look inside, but I needed a Norwegian dictionary, and Norway is a good place to buy them. It was 198 kroner, which is in the $30-$35 range.

I went to college in Minnesota, so when I found out I was going to Norway on a Fulbright, it wasn’t that hard to find a Norwegian class. The other college in town has a Scandinavian languages department, and a professor agreed to let me audit her intro class. It was pretty easy – I’d heard that Norwegian was what you took there if you needed to get the language requirement but couldn’t hack Spanish, and that seemed to be true.

My language education continued that summer at the University of Oslo’s lovely International Summer School. Many of the classes are international relations-y type topics and are taught in English, but you can also take Norwegian language and literature classes. By the end of my six-week intensive course, I could hold my own in a very, very simple conversation with a patient person, like the author of our textbook, who did the oral portion of our exam. (It’s a small country.)

Of course, then I went to Trondheim, where people speak nothing that resembles the standard Norwegian I’d learned in classes. And just to make it harderI was working in an academic environment with people who’d come from all over the country and brought their dialects with them. I mostly spoke English at work.

But I continued taking language classes, and with the help of my choir friends, I got pretty good at it by the end of the year. Choir friend Ann-Kristin, who I often saw at the bus stop on the way to work, refused on principle to speak English with foreigners. She was right, of course, and I appreciated her patience and her relatively easy dialect. (When I wasn’t around, she secretly spoke English with a visiting researcher from Spain; short-time visitors got a pass.) Another choir friend, Veronica, spent her summers guiding busloads of British tourists around her home islands, but eventually decided my Norwegian was good enough and switched. I never switched with another friend, Anna Bergitte – she’d lived in the U.S. in high school and spoke perfect idiomatic American.

The vast majority of Norwegians still speak much better English than I will ever speak Norwegian, but I’m still glad I learned it. I mean, obviously. I know how to pronounce æ, ø, å, and kj. I was able to read the Norwegian subtitles when I watched Scottish movies. And I’ve found it’s very useful with the older folks I’ve met through Norwegian folk dancing. (A hobby that came along much later.)

Fascinating fact I’ve just discovered while poking through the dictionary’s introduction: It was based on an English – Danish Danish – English dictionary that came out in 1991.  Norwegian and Danish are really, really close, particularly in written form. I can read Danish, but I have no hope of understanding it when it’s spoken.

Dictionary Stats: Lingua Engelsk-norsk norsk-engelsk Ordbok for videregående skole

date: 1996
publisher: Universitetsforlaget AS
length: 831 pages
guide words on p. 714: skjold et shield; (våpen~) coat of arms; (flekk) blotch; skredder en tailor; (dame~) dressmaker.
introduction: Includes a history of English-Danish dictionaries. The first one came out in 1678 and had a title along the lines of “English Dictionary of which can be learned the English Speech, containing the Words which do not have a known affinity with Latin or Danish.” The first Danish-English dictionary appeared in 1779. These were both actually written by Norwegians, the introduction proudly points out.
useful extras: As with so many foreign language dictionaries, the extras – a guide to English grammar, tips on writing letters in English, a box listing the ways to translate fabrikk into English – would be much more useful if I were coming at the dictionary from the other side of the English/Foreign Language divide.
obscenities: Yup! I guess upper secondary students in Norway can handle rude words.

Last Friday evening, one of Norway’s national broadcast stations showed a documentary called “Bergensbanen minutt for minutt” – “Bergen Line, Minute for Minute.” It was a seven-hour-long documentary showing, in real time, the train trip from Bergen to Oslo. Seven hours. And 16 minutes. Of train. According to NRK, 176,000 people sat in front of the TV for the whole thing and another 1.2 million dropped in for part of it. (That’s about one in four Norwegians.) The train goes through 182 tunnels on the way; during those bits, they edited in historic clips from the railway.

Missing out on the Bergensbane was the great disappointment of my last trip to Norway. I was so excited to take this train. It’s supposed to be one of the most beautiful train rides in the world; it goes from sea level in Bergen to sea level in Oslo, passing over the highlands on the way. The high point is 4,060 feet above sea level. But a couple of days before my ride I saw a picture on the front of the Bergen paper showing a derailed train lying in the snow. Uh-oh, I thought. I read the article and, yep. That was the Bergensbane, and it would be closed until they got those cars out of there.

So instead of a scenic seven-hour train ride over mountains and snow, I had a one-hour train ride – mostly through tunnels – to Voss, then a 5,000,000-hour bus ride to Oslo. The bus was full. The guy next to me wasn’t friendly. It was about the least pleasant transportation experience I’ve ever had in Norway, and I’m including the month in 1998 when the Trondheim city buses went on strike and I had to walk several miles to work.

The train documentary was such a big hit that they’re scrambling to get a DVD out in time for Christmas. I think they could sell that to train buffs all over the world, don’t you? Heck, I would watch it. I’m trying to get part 1 of the documentary to load on the NRK website right now.

Here are the articles from NRK: An Orgy for Train Lovers and A DVD of the Bergen Line is Coming!

photo: SRS scandiline