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Re: Russian "a" and Norwegian "ikke/ingen" (was: Re: Question about Latin.)

From:Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
Date:Tuesday, October 19, 2004, 18:40
Hi!

Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...> writes:
>... > By the way, I came upon an interesting case on my > Norwegian Yahoo: > > "Denne meldingen har ikke flagg". > (This message has no flag) > > In French (if I may call that French) we would say: "Ce message n'a > pas de flag". But if I had to retranslate it into Norwegian, without > knowing the context, I would incline to say: > > "Denne meldingen har *ingen* flagg".
Hmm, actually, some other Scandinavian languages (that I know better than Norwegian) prefer to use 'not' (ikke) in this case, too, instead of 'no' (ingen). I'd therefore think that the 'ikke' sentence is better in Norwegian, too. E.g. Icelandic: Eg hefur ekki bil. Or Swedish: Jag har inte bil. Both: 'I have no car', lit.: 'I have not car.' (I hope it's correct, I'm not fuent in either language...)
> and that, I guess, would be false, because a message > can only have one flag, if any.
Maybe only less Norwegian, I don't know. :-) **Henrik

Replies

Daniel Asserbo <conlang@...>
Joe <joe@...>
Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>