Vowels

The day our boxes we’d shipped from America arrived in Norway, I had to fill out forms and FAX the information to the custom’s office before they would release them. I went to the post office in our little neighborhood to see if they do faxing because it was a lot closer than going into town to the library where I knew a fax machine was available. Up until that point, I’d dealt with the woman at the post office speaking only limited Norwegian and had managed to communicate with her just fine, but that day, I had to speak English because I didn’t know all the words in Norwegian. Almost everyone in Norway speaks English anyway, so it’s easy to default to that in a pinch, but they really do respect and appreciate when us immigrants at least give their language a try.



“Do you FAX here?” I asked the lady behind the counter. “FAX?” she asked, “What is FAX?” I tried to show her with hand signals what the paper looks like when it’s sliding through the machine and I just kept saying, “You know, FAX.” She shook her head and finally said, “No.” Then a woman standing in line behind me said to the woman behind the counter, “fox” and the postal worker said, “Oh yes, FOX – yes, we FOX!” and my task was done.


That day I realized the biggest difference in the Norwegian language was in how I pronounced the vowels. In America, we have “hard” and “soft” vowels, but the Norwegians made up new vowels to represent the differences in sounds, so for instance, the sound an “a” would make in saying the word “apple” would be the Norwegian vowel “æ.” In English, a hard “o” is the vowel “å” in Norwegian, and we really don’t have a sound that comes close to the Norwegian vowel “ø” – except for the sound someone might make when they see something really gross. The Norwegian “i” sounds like an American “e” and the Norwegian “e” sounds like an American “y” unless the “e” is at the end of a word and then it sounds like an “a.”


Learning Norwegian, I discovered, is not for sissies. I quickly understood why the government did not require those over the age of 55 to take Norwegian lessons. At age 51, I found it pretty hard to shed old habits, especially verbal ones.