Re: [tied] Re: Linguistic measurements

Aquila grande wrote -


: Danish and Norwegian look nearly identical in writing ---

Isn't the reason for this that Norwegian has for a long time been spelled in a Danish way? Compare "Bokmål" - the older, Danish-influenced way of spelling with "Nynorsk" - "New Norwegian". Nynorsk doesn't look nearly identical with Danish (and its way of spelling makes it quite fun to read, at least for me).
::
: The grammar of these languages are nearly identical. The main
: difference is that the three-gender-system of IE has been simplified
: to an animate/inanimate system in Swedish and Danish. In Norwegian
: the feminine gender still exists as a declention within the animate
: gender, but also here the concordance in ajectives is governed only
: by the distinction animate/inanimate.

Hm. Not sure if I agree with this. In Swedish, the masculine and feminine of the original three gender system (as in German) have merged into the pronoun "den", but the masc. and fem. pronouns are kept when talking about people (as well as pets and things in an affectionate way). This gives us four 3rd person singular pronouns:
han - he (when speaking about people)
hon - she (when speaking about people)
den - it (masc. and fem. gender merged, most animate nouns belong here, but so do all nouns with original masc. or fem. gender, animate or not)
det - it (original neutre)

The distinction here is not animate/inanimate but rather human/non-human. As far as I know, Danish and Norwegian have the same system. Any Danish/Norwegian members on this list who would like to comment on this?

Hakan