Hello gentlemen!

I have a favor to ask. My family will be hosting a foreign exchange student from Norway next school year.
She and her whole family speak several languages, including French, English, Swedish, and of course, Norwegian.

I would like to at least be able to pronounce her name without sounding like a fool, and to make her feel as comfortable here as possible.

Her name Ida Tylleskaer
Fathers name is Thorkild Tylleskaer
Mothers name is Carren Tylleskaer

any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated!

Thank You!
Joe

quote:

Originally posted by acsteele:
Hello gentlemen!

I have a favor to ask. My family will be hosting a foreign exchange student from Norway next school year.
She and her whole family speak several languages, including French, English, Swedish, and of course, Norwegian.

I would like to at least be able to pronounce her name without sounding like a fool, and to make her feel as comfortable here as possible.

Her name Ida Tylleskaer
Fathers name is Thorkild Tylleskaer
Mothers name is Carren Tylleskaer

any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated!

Thank You!
Joe

Hey Joe,
Something like this:

Ida - just say India without the n and second i - eeda.

Thorkild - (tor) as in (tor)tilla, kill (as murder) - Tor-kill.

Carren is not a Norwegian name, so I would pronounce it as you do in the US.

Tylleskaer does not look right, but if it is, we would pronounce it: (ty) as in (ty)pical and then with a typical double ll, tyll. Tylles, (es) as in (es)presso. kaer as in car. Tý-ll-es-car with a the preassure on the y.

Hopefully you are now not completely lost in the woods...
Good luck!

Bent,

Is it common for Anglophones to bite their tongue while in Norway.

I had a Norwegian girlfriend here, and she brought a Fjallraven catalog to show me the hunting stuff.

I was falling over the pronounciation of the words and out of her mouth it sounded like music.

I have plans to take the train to the top of the rail line then fly over and come back down through Sweden next summer. I had planned to drive but didn't realize the road doesn't go all the way to the top.

I am sure it will be a good exercise in my ability to learn pronounciation quickly.

It always amazed me how all of the Germanic lanuages have such extremely different prounounciation.

I was sort of scratching my head how to attac this one, and then Bent came up with the solution as easy as a wink

D99... I guess one answer to your "challenge" is that we pronounce the letters, or at least most of them, a bit different than in the English language.

I once read that back in the ages of the Viking raids and colonisation of the British Isles, the Nordic and old English languages was pretty much in the same neighbourhood, and that they understood each other farly well.

Thank you very much!

Joe

It wasn't a challenge mate, I have a real hard time with those double and triple consonants.

In English they are called consonants clusters. I don't know of any in English off hand. I know they exhist, but I don't remember any words that have them.

The Latin languages have a lot of clusters but they are usually vowels. So it's a touch easier.

I have a computer disk on the language and it reads a word and then you read it back to it. To learn the language. I am looking for a good language learning program. The one I have isn't very good, well at least for me.

But then again D99, once you realize that in Norwegain the double consonants can help your pronounciation, they become your friends! Most ofthen you emhpasize the doubles. So I would beg to differ with Bent on this quote:
Tý-ll-es-car with a the preassure on the y.
You put the pressuer on teh double consonants, the ll's.
good luck by the way!

Maybe you can explain all the "H"s .I have seen my name , Robert with an H at the end and I have a cousin there named Brith but pronounced just as a T. Then of course there is Thor , don't the Swedes spell it Tor ? Why the overproduction of H s ??

Sure we do his name is Tor, god of thunder and lightning.

Thor is the britt version, in my mind.
Here in Sweden we have names derived from Tor as well, Tore, Torbjörn (Thor-Bear), strong name, Torsten (Thor-stone), Torben, Ture and so on.

Scandinavian namens that has been americanified is quite common, Hansen, Danish is Hansson in Swedish, Larsson, Larsen also Danish ans easier to pronounce Gustavsson, Gustavsen, there are also some old Swedish soldiers names(knektnamn) that appear, Stål, Steel, Starke, Strong, lans, Lance, Tapper, Brave, some are translations and some are just soundalikes.

It´s a realy quite a lot of fun watching american shows on the TV.

A personal favorite of mine is Deadliest Catch on Discovery, a show about crabbing, since I lived for a year just 20 km away from the boats main harbour.


Best regards Chris.

quote:

Originally posted by mete:
Maybe you can explain all the "H"s .I have seen my name , Robert with an H at the end and I have a cousin there named Brith but pronounced just as a T. Then of course there is Thor , don't the Swedes spell it Tor ? Why the overproduction of H s ??

I believe many "h"s are added because people in the upper classes during the 18th or 19th century thought it looked more elegant. Then as time passed, it spread "down" through the social layers and became common.

Thanks, I'm glad to finally get a reason.

quote:

Originally posted by mete:
Maybe you can explain all the "H"s .I have seen my name , Robert with an H at the end and I have a cousin there named Brith but pronounced just as a T. Then of course there is Thor , don't the Swedes spell it Tor ? Why the overproduction of H s ??

Actually, the Th as in Thor is a sound that has been discarded by today´s Scandinavians and has nothing to do with 18th century aristocracy or being posh at all. It reaches back a few more centuries than that.

The original norse/northern germanic spelling included the nice letter "Þ" which happens to be spelled exactly as Th is English, as in the word "thing". Remember, English has its roots in Northern or low Germanic.

The ironic "TH"ing is that the Scandinavian peoples have dropped the "h" sound from from "Thor" or "Þórr" as his name would have been spelled about 1000 years ago. The English have kept it.

So, Christian, you are wrong on that account. "Tor" is a Scandinavian simplification of "Thor" or "Þórr", just as the Scandinavian languages of today have become less complex since then.

Regards

So that's what those funny looking letters mean , thanks.....Happy 17 th of May to all you Norwegians !!!

quote:

Originally posted by mete:
....Happy 17 th of May to all you Norwegians !!!

many thanks mete
17. of May is the DAY for the Norwegians, 193 years since we got our own Constitution, and 102 years since we finally became a free country after approx 600 years under Danish and Swedish rule.