Languagle #3: Norwegian
Som man roper i skogen, får man svar
"As you shout in the forest, so you get your answer."
What it means
Used to say that people tend to get back the same tone they put out, so hostility or respect from others is often just an echo of how you first spoke or acted.
How to say it
som mahn ROO-per ee SKOO-gen, fohr mahn SVAHR
Norwegian o is often said like oo, and å like the aw in 'law'. Spoken Norwegian has a sing-song rise and fall that no spelling can show.
Word by word
- Som som: as
- man mahn: one, you
- roper ROO-per: shouts
- i skogen ee SKOO-gen: in the forest
- får fohr: gets
- svar svahr: answer
Norwegian puts 'the' on the end of a word: skog is a forest, skogen is the forest.
Where it comes from
It's grounded in the literal experience of shouting into a forest and hearing your own words come back unchanged, used here as a metaphor rather than a description of sound.
Where it was found
Norwegian calls a proverb an ordtak. This one is from a list of Norwegian ordtak on Livsverden.
Similar sayings
- German: Wie man in den Wald hineinruft, so schallt es heraus. As you call into the forest, so it echoes back.
- English: What goes around comes around
How to recognise Norwegian
Norwegian uses three extra letters: æ, ø and å. Danish uses exactly the same three, and written Danish and Norwegian look very alike. A good clue is that Danish often has b, d and g where Norwegian has p, t and k: Danish bog and gade, Norwegian bok and gate (book, street). In Danish this proverb would be 'Som man råber i skoven'. Swedish uses ä and ö instead of æ and ø, and Icelandic and Faroese have ð.
About the Norwegian language
Norwegian is a North Germanic language spoken by around 5 million people in Norway. It has two official written standards, Bokmål and Nynorsk, and no official spoken standard, so people generally speak their own local dialect, even on national television. It is largely mutually intelligible with Swedish and Danish. It uses the Latin alphabet with three extra letters: æ, ø and å.
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