Word Associations

Oops - I forgot to post this last week!  Sorry.

We had several lessons on Norwegian foods in my Norwegian class during a week The Good Teacher Inga was gone and we had a substitute. The substitute teacher taught us that certain foods last longer than others and that’s why so many fresh produce items aren’t available in Norway – because they won’t survive the trip so far north (like I hadn’t figured that one out already.) She also told us about some foods that become poisonous after awhile. Of course she was talking only in Norwegian (not ever sneaking in an English word here and there to help our comprehension, like The Good Teacher Inga did), and I heard the substitute say a word that she used a few days earlier when she was talking about families (we had to learn the names of family members on that particular day.) The word that caught my attention was “gift” (pronounced “yift.”) It’s the Norwegian word for “married,” but as we all learned during our food lesson, it’s also the Norwegian word for “poison.”




I brought up the irony of “gift” being used for both “married” and “poison” and asked the substitute why that would be. I got her to think a minute, but she was not able to answer my question. There were several Spanish speaking students in our class too, so I also pointed out that the Spanish word “esposa” means “wife,” but it also means “handcuffs.” I don’t like those associations one little bit, but I must say, it makes certain words easier to remember – like the English word “but” is “men” in Norwegian.



There are so many things to remember with a new language, I must do what I can to help the process. But why a “child” is called “barn” in Norwegian, I have no idea. I know as a kid, my mom used to ask me if I was “born in a barn” when I left the door open, so maybe there’s something there -- she is full blooded Norwegian, after all.



We studied weather words that week too, and if it’s cloudy they say in Norwegian it’s “skyet” (pronounced “she-it”). Here all these years I thought my mom was swearing when she’d say a certain word in a particular kind of way, but as it turns out, it seems, she was just talking about the weather.