# A Danish and Dano-Norwegian Grammar

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A DANISH
and
Dano-Norwegian Grammar
by
P. GROTH, A.M.
BOSTON, U.S.A.
D. C. HEATH & CO., PUBLISHERS
1894
By P. GROTH
All rights reserved
PRESS OF
Rockwell and Churchill
BOSTON, U.S.A.
PREFACE
AS a teacher of the Danish or Norwegian language to English speaking students I had very often felt the lack of a reliable grammar of the language, and finally I made up my mind to try to supply the want. Special conditions of which I have not been master have caused the time intervening between the writing of this book and its appearance in print to be a good deal longer than it ought to have been, i. e. about two years, and meanwhile there have appeared a couple of Danish or Norwegian grammars that may deserve this name.
The reason why I have given my book the somewhat cumbersome title of a "Danish and Dano-Norwegian Grammar" will be apparent from the "Introduction." As regards the use of the book I would advise the student first to make up his mind, whether he wants to study the pure Danish language or the Dano-Norwegian language. This must to a large extent depend upon personal and practical considerations. The tourist, the commercial traveller, the merchant may need to study one branch of the language or the other; the literary student may wish to acquaint himself with genuine Danish, or he may wish to study the vernacular of Bjørnson and Ibsen. As a general rule I would say that the Danish pronunciation offers, with its "glottal catch" and other peculiarities, more difficulties to the English speaking student than the Norwegian pronunciation. ​The student who wants to study Danish must pass by §§ 81 to 146, while those who want to study Norwegian must pass directly from §§ 8 to 81. Besides, in the “Etymology,” attention is often called to certain rules as being peculiar to Danish, others to Norwegian. The student must select those he needs, and pass by those that refer to the language that he is not studying.
I have added some “Exercises” at the end of the book in order to help the student fix in his memory those rules and paradigms which he must know before he can, with any degree of success, commence reading the language. For those who wish more exercises I can recommend Mr. K. Brekke’s excellent Lærebog i Engelsk which is intended for Norwegian students of English, but may also to a certain extent be used the other way. The student may find an abundance of good readers prepared for use in the Danish and Norwegian schools. I mention only Otto Borchsenius and F. Winkel Horn’s Dansk Læsebog, Eriksen and Paulsen’s Norsk Læsebog, Pauss and Lassen’s Læsebog i Modersmaalet, each of them in several volumes. As Dictionaries can be thoroughly recommended: A. Larsen’s Dansk-Norsk Engelsk Ordbog and Rosing’s Engelsk-Dansk Ordbog. To those who want to study the Norwegian form of the language I would recommend: I. Brynildsen’s Norsk-engelsk ordbog and the same author’s edition of Geelmuyden’s Engelsk-norsk ordbog. The tourist will find Bennett’s Phrasebook, Olsvig’s Words and Phrases and the same author’s Yes and No valuable guides to familiarity with the peculiarities of the language.
This Grammar, besides being based upon my own studies and knowledge of the language, rests, as far as Danish is concerned, chiefly upon the works of Sweet, Dahlerup and Jespersen, Jessen, Bojesen, Lefolii and B. T. Dahl, and for ​the Norwegian upon the grammars of Lökke and Hofgaard and the treatises of Storm, Western, Brekke and J. Aars. To those who desire a more detailed knowledge of the language than can be had from this book I would recommend Poëstion’s Dänische Sprache and the same author’s Lehrbuch der Norwegischen Sprache; both these books are excellent, and especially the Danish Grammar has often been of use to me in writing this book.
The several species of types that are peculiar to the Scandinavian languages compelled me to have this book set in a Danish Newspaper printing office in New York City, not properly equipped for a work of this kind. On that account the typographical appearance of the book is not in every respect as good as I would like it to have been. Deserving of special mention is the fact that the types œ and æ are everywhere in the book used promiscuously to represent the latter character except in §92 where the sign œ is used a couple of times to denote and explain a variety of the sound of ö.
Finally I must acknowledge my debt of gratitude to Professor Dr. Joh. Storm of the University of Christiania for kindly sending me those advance sheets of the 2d edition of his “Englische Philologie” that were of use to me in preparing this grammar, to my honored friend Professor A. H. Palmer of Yale University for kindly reading through the larger part of the book in manuscript and making valuable suggestions, and, last but not least, to Mr. Chr. Børs, late Consul of Norway and Sweden at New York, without whose munificience, proverbial among Norwegians in New York, this book would never have seen the light of day.
Brooklyn, N. Y., August 25th, 1894.
CONTENTS.
| | Page. | Page. |
| Introduction | | 1–2 |
| The Alphabet | | 3 |
| Danish Sounds | | 4–29 |
| Vowels | 4 | |
| Diphthongs | 11 | |
| Consonants | 11 | |
| Colloquial forms | 21 | |
| Accent | 21 | |
| Sentence accent | 25 | |
| Glottal Stop | 26 | |
| Quantity | 28 | |
| Norwegian Sounds | | 30–65 |
| Vowels | 30 | |
| Diphthongs | 35 | |
| Consonants | 36 | |
| Accent | 52 | |
| Abbreviations | 58 | |
| Quantity | 63 | |
| Vowel Changes in inflection and word formation | | 66 |
| Etymology | | 67–131 |
| Articles—genders | 67 | |
| Nouns | 70–83 | |
| Gender of the nouns | 70 | |
| Formation of the possessive | 76 | |
| Syntactical remarks about the use of the possessive | 77 | |
| Formation of the plural | 78 | ​ |
| The Adjectives | 83–91 | |
| Declension of the adjectives | 83 | |
| Use of the definite form of the adjectives | 86 | |
| Agreement of the adjective with its noun | 87 | |
| Comparison of adjectives | 87 | |
| Inflection and use of the comparative and superlative | 90 | |
| The Pronouns | 91–99 | |
| The personal pronouns | 91 | |
| The reflexive and reciprocal pronouns | 92 | |
| The possessive pronouns | 93 | |
| The demonstrative pronouns | 94 | |
| The interrogative pronouns | 95 | |
| The relative pronouns | 96 | |
| The indefinite pronouns | 98 | |
| The Numerals | 99–102 | |
| The Verbs | 102–121 | |
| Weak verbs | 104 | |
| Strong verbs | 107 | |
| Irregular verbs | 113 | |
| The use of the numbers | 114 | |
| The use of the tenses | 114 | |
| The use of the modes | 116 | |
| The passive voice | 119 | |
| Reflexive and impersonal verbs | 121 | |
| The Adverbs | | 122–124 |
| The Prepositions | | 124–126 |
| The Conjunctions | | 126–128 |
| The Interjections | | 128–129 |
| The order of the words in the sentence | | 129–130 |
| The Punctuation | | 131 |
| Exercises | | 132–143 |
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1930, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 93 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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