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Scandiasyn-bloggen i mars 2010

Torsdag 25. mars Jämtlandsresa Krokoms gamla lanthandel. Foto: Henrik Rosenkvist I mitten av mars träffades jag och Henrik i Stockholm för att åka och samla informantdata på två orter i Jämtland. Med Östersund som bas åkte vi till närliggande Svenstavik i Berg och Aspås för att intervjua informanter. I Svenstavik höll vi till på kommungården som lånade ut ett rum åt oss, och i Aspås var vi hemma hos de intervjuade. Alla vi träffade deltog i SweDia 2000, så när som på en informant i Aspås som flexibelt fungerade som stand-in för en av de andra informanterna som blev förhindrad av sitt arbete. Vår yngre kvinnliga informant lyckades leta reda på en motsvarande manlig informant, som vi gästade tio minuter senare på lördagmorgon. Flera informanter tyckte att den jämtska som användes i testmeningarna var för utjämnad och skiljde sig mycket från de enskilda dialekterna, vilket vi beslöt att tänka på till de kommande inspelningarna. Nästa resa gör vi till Uppland i april. – Tiina Nessies jämtska släkting. Foto: Henrik Rosenkvist Tirsdag 23. mars Blog from Mid-West tour. Part 3. (Read part 1 and part 2 further down.) For more information, see http://www.tekstlab.uio.no/nota/NorDiaSyn/english/norwegianinamerica.html Mid-West tour. 18. March 2010: Grand Forks, North Dakota. Our informants and Signe. Photo: Janne Bondi Johannessen We met our informants from Gary, Minnesota, at our motel in Grand Forks, North Dakota. They warned us about both possible snowstorms and flooding from the Red River, and did not want us to go to their place. They were husband and wife (90 and 89 years old). We had only thought the wife spoke Norwegian, and were pleasantly surprised that the husband was also Norwegian with a good command of the language. The woman was very interested in geneology and had traced her husband’s Norwegian ancestors back to the 14th century. She also was very interested in history, and gave us a long introduction to the intricacies of medieval Scandinavian kings. Her family background was from Hallingdal and Sogn, but definitely spoke Halling. Her husband’s family was from Østfold. He had been a teacher in a school at a Native American reservation, where their sons had also gone, being the only two white children in there. They also told us how easy ot had been to homestead up in that area compared with elsewhere. There were no trees to cut down, no rocks to clear away, and the black soil was and is of superior quality. The wife was incredibly fluent, and had also written two stories for us about her ancestors, one in Halling and one in Sogning. She told us that she hardly ever gets the chance to speak Norwegian anymore. She and her husband never speak Norwegian together. Flooding in North Dakota Photo: Signe Laake On the road again. Photo: Janne Bondi Johannessen Mid-West tour. 19. March 2010: Grand Forks, North Dakota to Chicago, Illinois. We started driving towards Chicago in the afternoon of the 18. March, stayed at a motel in Hudson, Wisconsin, and arrived in Chicago at 5 PM on the 19. March. We had then driven 1194 kilomeres! Signe was impressed with Janne’s phlegmatic driver skills in the Chicago rush hour traffic. Mid-West tour. 20. March 2010: Chicago, Illionois. Our informant in Chicago and Signe Laake Photo: Janne Bondi Johannessen Our final informant on this tour was a 89,5 year-old woman in a nice little street in West Chicago. Two of her sons, both policemen, and a daughter-in-law were also present. (One of them, strangely, to us, worked in the Coast Guard...) She was our only urban informant; her parents had both immigrated to Chicago rather than homesteading or bying a farm. Her mother was from Moss, and our informant had the most urban accent that we have encountered on this tour. Her father (from Sunnfjord, a fact that did not show in her language) had been an iron constructor, and had built the Wrigley Building in downtown Chicago. We spent the afternoon sightseeing for the first time, and in the worst weather we have had here, cold, windy and snowy. But Chicago is great. We liked the river and the combination of new and old sky scrapers, and we liked the Millenium Park, with its bean (an exciting sculpture). Janne Bondi Johannesssen in Chicago. The old, white building in the background was built by the father of our informant Photo: Signe Laake The Cloud gate by Anish Kapoor, also called The Bean Mid-West tour. 21. March 2010: Chicago, Illionois to Oslo, Norway. We handed in the car at the Avis place at the airport, and found that we have driven 2414 miles on this journey. That equals 3862 kilometres! Before leaving the cente, Signe went to the Chicago Art Institute, the second biggest art museum in the USA, and was thrilled. Janne stayed at the hotel working. (She is the boss, after all!) This tour has been great and we have learned a lot. The recordings will be invaluable for researchers in the future. Thank you to all our informants and contact persons! – Janne and Signe Norge is everywhere. Photo: Janne Bondi Johannessen Tysdag 23. mars The special issue of Studia Linguistica on exclamatives, based on the NORMS workshop on the topic in October 2007, has now finally come out (cf. this page). Two of the papers in the volume – the ones by Lars-Olof Delsing and Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson – plus a considerable portion of the introduction discuss exclamatives in North Germanic/Scandinavian. In addition Terje Lohndal's paper on Norwegian exclamatives is to appear in Linguistic Analysis. – Øystein Lørdag 20. mars Blog from Mid-West tour. Part 2. (Read part 1 further down.) For more information, see http://www.tekstlab.uio.no/nota/NorDiaSyn/english/norwegianinamerica.html Mid-West tour. 14. March 2010: Albert Lea, Minnesota. Our informant, Janne and Signe We met a very nice lady aged 85, in her own apartment in Albert Lea, a town in the Southern part of Minnesota, near Iowa. She lived the first years of her life in Iowa, but her parents moved to Minnesota, so that she could go to school. She was fifth generation Norwegian in USA on her mother’s side and third on her father’s side! Our informant hardly gets the chance to speak Norwegian anymore. She used to speak with relatives and parents, but since her mother died, there hasn’t been a lot of possibility. Fortunately, her mother lived to be 98, and didn’t die until 2001! Our informant’s family was from Valdres and Kongsberg, and you could hear the Valdres accent in her. This lady is amazing. She has just read a book about Einstein, and could also read Norwegian. After a long and interesting talk with our informant, we went to Northfield, where we were interviewed by the radio! The show is hosted by Ruth Marie Sylte, and will be available at podcast at Radio Multe from March 26 local time (possibly 27th Norwegian time): http://multemusic.com/downloads/ Mid-West tour. 15. March 2010: Stillwater, Minnesota. Signe talking to our informant. Photo: Janne Bondi Johannessen In Stillwater we met a charming 90 year-old man, who worked part-time in his son’s accountancy firm! He was extraordinarily clear, and could tell us all about homesteading, which is how the Norwegians got land: They were offered a quarter, i.e. 160 acres (= 640 dekar) and could keep it for free if they could show to ”uncle Sam” that they had improved within five years it to become farmland. We have later learned that homesteading in some places, e.g. in North Dakota, was much easier than elsewhere, given that this was prairie land with no trees and no rocks, and very fertile soil. Our informant’s family is from Vestfold, but we thought his dialect was more like that of the other Norwegian Americans that we have met, a general Eastern Norwegian dialect. From Stillwater we had 400 km drive to South Dakota, and we chose to spend the night in a motel in Sisseton. Janne, Signe and our informant in Stillwater Mid-West tour. 16. March 2010: Webster, South Dakota. Norwegan artifacts in Webster. Photo: Janne Bondi Johannessen After an hour’s drive, we came to the house of a very nice married couple, where we were going to talk to the husband, 85, and his friend, also 85. These were the first informants we’ve met so far from North Norway. Both men had family from the Mo i Rana area. All of the friend’s family was from there, as well as the husband’s father, while his mother was from Nordfjord. We both noticed that the husband actually adapted his speech so that he spoke more the Nordfjord dialect with us, and more the northern dialect when he spoke with his friend. The friend’s dialect was definitely North Norwegian. Here are some examples of the North Norwegian: - palatalisation of alveolar consonants (n, t) - preproprial article: ”han Lars, han bestefar” (Lars, ’grandfather’) - choice of modifying adverb: ”den va bra stor” (’it was quite big’, but lit.: ’good big’) - a longer example that those who know North Norwegian will recognise: ”Det va’kje nån så hadd penga!” ’There was not anybody who had money.’ Our informants and Signe. Photo: Janne Bondi Johannessen But other features that we have seen in the Norwegian American dialect were also present here. For example, the friend told us that his job used to be to /byge ro:d/ (’to build roads’, i.e. not a Norwegian choice of word for road. We must mention that we always ask people if they are Norwegian or American. They never answer just American, but most times they answer Norwegian American. The friend answered just Norwegian. This is very touching to hear from a man who has never been to Norway! The couple were very hospitable, and the wife had cooked us a very nice lunch. Their house was full of Norwegian things on display, like flags, rose-painted bowls, Selbu mittens, pictures and Norwegian-language embroideries, so we felt at home! In fact, many of the homes and the places we have been to have had Norwegian artifacts on display. There is not doubt that people are proud and happy about their Norwegian background, a point that they also express explicitly. We are not sociolinguists, but we have picked up the idea that there is a correlation between pride of a culture and bringing its language forward. We have not seen that correlation here. The husband in Webster is the first and only Norwegian American we have met who also spoke Norwegian to his child. All the others have thought it best for their children to learn English only, in order to have a better chance to succeed at school and in society. And yet, these same people have a deep love for their Norwegian heritage. Filling gas in the middle of nowhere. Photo: Signe Laake Mid-West tour. 17. March 2010: Hatton, North Dakota. All our informants and Janne in Hatton. Photo: Signe Laake Our contact person and informant in Hatton lives on his farm, now run by his son. Other relatives live nearby, and we were pleasantly suprised to also meet four more people, all sisters, brothers, and interrelated through marriage in various ways and all in their late seventies and eighties. We used three of them as informants as well. In addition we met three grand children, who were helping to make food and serving us. We got homemade Norwegian rømmegrøt, lefse, sandkaker and lots of other nice food. One informant holding a "ture", an utencil for making rømmegrøt. Photo: Signe Laake These informants are from Telemark. Some of them have been to Norway, but not all. We found, as before, that there is definitely a special variety of Norwegian that is spoken in the USA, and that this variety has many common features across the whole region. These features are especially lexical, but it is also true that there are some features from the original dialect as spoken in Norway, that our American informants don’t have. One obvious example are the pronouns; our informants did not use the typical Telemark pronous lik kånn (”us”) and dekkån (”you”). Today we also heard the Mid-West English that we had been told about at the beginning of our journey. One of our informants had an intonation pattern that sounded just like that of a Norwegian speaking English, and he also did not have the dental fricatives (written th), but replaced them with ordinary stops (written t or d). So for example: /to:t/ is ”thought”, /tri:/ is ”three”. For Norwegian Norwegians, this is fascinating. The beautiful farm in Hatton. Photo: Janne Bondi Johannessen – Janne and Signe (Part 3 of this field trip report continues above. Click this link.) Tisdag 16. mars NorDiaCorp-meeting in Helsinki We (Tiina and Henrik from Lund) went to Helsinki on the 5th of March for a meeting with the NorDiaCorp group in Finland. We arrived at noon, and after a short taxi trip to the university we were met by Camilla Wide and her team: Lisa Södergård, Helena Palmén, Leila Mattfolk and Sanna Wiklund. Margareta Södergård, who couldn’t attend, will also participate in the project. The Finnish group intends to start their data collection in the summer, and we informed them about our experiences, the background for the project, methodology and a number of practical issues (like how to best record test sentences). Lisa Södergård had translated the questionnaire into local Swedish dialect, and we discussed her version of the questionnaire in detail. We talked for about four hours, including a coffee break with Swedish as well as Finnish coffee and small Karelian pirogues (baked on rye). Pictures and a Swedish recipe can be found here. In the evening, Camilla and Henrik continued the discussion at a restaurant. – Henrik Måndag 15. mars Viktig information för er som skriver på denna blogg! Det kommentarsystem vi har använt på denna bloggen har ändrats och för att slippa betala för det har jag satt in ett nytt system. Själva koden, som kommer på samma ställe i texten som förut, ser ut så här: <div> <script> var idcomments_acct = 'fbff353244a1888e79a2bb09b9364e51'; var idcomments_post_id = 'DATE'; var idcomments_post_url = 'POST_NAME'; </script> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.intensedebate.com/js/genericLinkWrapperV2.js"></script> </div> Det man behöver göra är att ändra följande två linjer: var idcomments_post_id = 'DATE'; var idcomments_post_url = 'POST_NAME'; I stället för DATE skriver man in dagens datum och i stället för POST_NAME skriver man namnet på inlägget (samma som under a name ovan vid inläggets början). I stället för det som stod vid Janne och Signes post (13032010 och midwesttour) skriver jag nu 15032010 och kommentarer. Man får akta sig att man inte ändrar något annat, för då kommer inga kommentarer att synas. Speciellt viktigt är också att man inte tar bort <div> och </div> för då kommer kommentarlänkarna som i en klunga vid det översta inlägget. – Gunnar Hrafn Saturday 13 March Brief introducion on the Mid-West tour 8.-22. March 2010. Part 1 When the Norwegian Research Council and our own department ILN at the UiO granted money to extend the Norwegian Dialect Syntax project to Norwegian-American dialects in the US, the Mid-West tour was planned immediately, and this blog recounts our experiences from Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South and North Dakota. Janne Bondi Johannessen and Signe Laake are at present on a two-week tour in the Mid-West of the USA to record Norwegian-American speech. We have lined up meetings with informants throughout this period. The informants or acquaintances of theirs contacted us after having seen adverts we had placed in Norwegian-American journals. We want to see what this language is like, look at its dialectal variation, a variation that is caused both by the original dialects in the old country and by the geographical conditions, distance and contact, as well as linguistic conditions. By recording the speech in various places we will get good background material for studying the language, not least as a preparation for the workshop we are planning together with the University of Wisconsin, Madison, this autumn. For more information, see http://www.tekstlab.uio.no/nota/NorDiaSyn/english/norwegianinamerica.html Mid-West tour. 9. March 2010: University of Wisconsin, Madison Janne and Joe Salmons After a very long travel from Oslo to Chicago (ten hours in the air) and an exciting two-hour car journey through fog and dark from Chicago O’Hare Airport we finally arrived at our first destination, the Double Tree Hotel in Madison. It was Professor Joe Salmons who had kindly booked it for us. The morning of the 9. March he picked us up at our hotel at 8, and we walked over to the nice building at the University Club, where his department is. Troughout the day we had a really good time with Joe, who we met for the first time after several months of correspondence. He took really good care of us, w.r.t. food, coffee and linguistics (and pleasant company), and we met with several colleagues and students of his, who were interested in dialect collection and building up resources. Janne also had the chance to give a talk at the university about the Nordic ScanDiaSyn project and the Nordic Dialect Corpus to an interested audience. We wil probably cooperate more in the future, not least aout the workshop that we are planning together, to be held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, on the 16.-17. September this year. The evening ended with a very nice dinner at the house of Peggy Hager and her husband Tom. Peggy teaches Norwegian at the university in Madison, and was even interviewed about Norwegian mentality and the Winter Olympics in Wall Street Journal. Mid-West tour. 10. March 2010: Westby, Wisconsin Eileen and Signe in Westby The day started with our contact person for Westby, Eileen Nelson, meeting us at 7 for a very nice and sociable breakfast at the hotel, and then leading the way on the two hour drive to Westby. In Westby we went to the farm where Eileen’s sister Sharon received us with great hospitality, and we met three very charming informants, aged 79-87. We did a short interview with each of them, and then asked them to talk with each other, two and two, while we were recording them, just as we do with dialect informants in Norway. The Norwegian dialect of Westby has a strong Gudbrandsdal origin, with some Østerdal as well. Here we experienced what we have also seen later: These dialect speakers, unlike the ones in Norway, do not understand the high speed Oslo dialect. Since their school education has all been in English, and do not know how to read and write Norwegian very well, they are not familiar with the written language, and hence haven’t encountered the words of the central Oslo region. We quickly learned that we must adapt, and we now use question words like håssen, håkken, høkken, køss,koss, kor, å instead of hvordan, åssen, hvor, hva, to be able to ask questions on "how","where", "what", "who" etc. Our informants told us that although Norwegian was the only language they spoke until school age, they nowadays speak mostly English. Even so, it i clear to us that their Norwegian language is mostly very fluent, even though they may sometimes be searching for words. Informants in Westby The day in Westby was very pleasant, and we had many good laughs during the hours we were there, including the lunch at Sharon's house, eating her husbond's nice vegetable soup and Wisconsin cheeses. In the afternoon we drove to Minnesota, to our motel in Willmar, a drive that took seven hours through thick fog, and also in the dark. Would anybody believe us when we tell you that we were driving on a little country road and missing the left exit, in spite of the GPS instructing us about it and we driving really slowly not to miss it? That is how thick the fog was. Since we couldn’t see the whole width of the narow road, we also at one point were driving on the hard shoulder, thinking it was the right hand lane. Ant at another point we were drivin on the left side of the road, not realising that this was what we were doing. Janne in Westby Westby   Mid-West tour. 11-12. March 2010: Sunburg, Minnesota Some of our informants in Sunburg Willmar was our home while having two days of recordings in Sunburg. It was Jane Norman who had contacted us. She and her sister Annie runs the Kultur Hus (culture house) in Sunburg. Through some brief e-mail correspondence before we came, whe had understood exactly what we needed, and had found us 13 informants, spread out over two days, two by two, and had even included a schedule with names and times for each informant. She also provided lunch for us and excellent localities in her Kultur Hus, with a common room downstairs, and two recording rooms upstairs! We had a wonderful time i Sunburg as well. The informants here too had mostly not learnt English until they went to school, and Sunburg and the whole area around it was almost totally Norwegian in the first decades of the 1900s. One of out informants We heard many nice stories and many reflections on language. One of our informants in Sunburg said: "Actually, there are some English words in the Norwegian language that we speak here: for example træin [pronounced like a Norwegian word] is really very similar to the English word train!" This statement is very wise, we think. It is really clear to us that the Norwegian spoken in each area is a dialect with its own stable vocabulary. Thus, it is not as if English words are taken randomly into their language by each individual, but rather, that their language has a certain mass of clearly defined loan words that are phonologically and morphologically integrated in the language. Some examples: Lexical loans into the Sunburg dialect: /travle/ : to walk (used about walking outside, in the forest etc.) /go:/ : to go (the phonology and inflection is like Norwegian gå "walk", but has received a new meaning from English) /portret/ : photograph (e.g. used about a photograph of a crib) /ro:dn/ : the road /ænti mi/ : my aunt /no:/ : no (as denial) (the Norwegian word nei is still used as a discourse particle) /hi:reman/ : hired farm worker [titsher] : teacher, sh is a retroflex fricative /fi:ld/ : field We'll report on syntax later. Kulturhus in Sunburg Jane Norman, our contact person in Sunburg Mid-West tour. 13. March 2010: Starbuck, Minnesota Helen Bjorgo with her daughter and son in law In this little place on the shore of Lake Minnewaska we stayed the night in a B&B. We had dinner in a place, The Wild Ridge, Glenwood, we were recommended by a guy at a petrol station (gas station, as they say around here), and we can safely say that it was an error of judgment not to be cricial to one’s sources. It was the worst meal Janne has ever had, and the whole plate of dry, old, brown potatoes filled with a sickly, yellow, luke-warm cheese substitute, had to be left uneaten. Add to that that the waitress first served the luke-warm food, then forgot to give us cutlery, and that the inedible potatoes came with lots of bacon even after Janne told her she didn’t want meat, and you can calculate the tips that she got from us. Unbelievably, the restaurant was full, which probably says everything about the choice of restaurants around here. Starbuck is also old Norwegian territory, and the landlady and landlord of our B&B are both 100 % Norwegian, as they say. But they don’t speak Norwegian. Having walked around here a bit this morning, it turns out that there is a Norwegian museum here, and they have big sign saying they made the world’s biggest lefse in 1983. In Starbuck we met a very old and very nice informant, Helen, at 90. We had been invited to her apartment, and it turned out her daughter and son-in-law were also present. They were very hospitable and we had a great time talking about the olden days in Norway and Minnesota. Her family background is from Jostedalen, Sogn, which was clearly audible in her Norwegian, but there were also other features that showed she is a real Norwegian-American, related not least to the vocabulary we wrote about yesterday. – Janne and Signe (Part 2 of this field trip report continues above. Click this link.) Lefse in Starbuck Minnesota Our car