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

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

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