# Norwegian: hjem/hjemme



## janesaddiction

Hi

I wanted to ask whats the *difference between hjem and hjemme*.
As in the following examples:

_Kommer du ikke snart hjem?
Er mor hjemme?_

My first guess would be that _hjem_ means "to home" and _hjemme_ "at home".


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## bicontinental

The adverb _hjem_ is a used about the direction/the motion "towards home", e.g. I'm going home, I'm on my way home (_på vei hjem_)
The adverb _hjemme_ is the equivalent of a locative case...it refers to the location at home. 
Bic.


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## NorwegianNYC

Building on what Bic just said: _hjem_ and _hjemme _belong to a group called prepositional adverbs. It means that they in addition to being adverbs have prepositional properties. They fall into two categories Location(-al) and Transition(-al). The prepositional adverbs are often controlled by the verb type, meaning that a stative verb (which expresses a state of being) will trigger the location form, whereas a dynamic verb will trigger the transition form.

JEG GÅR HJEM > JEG (s) GÅR (v-dynamic) HJEM (adv-trans)
JEG ER HJEMME > JEG (s) ER (v-stative) HJEMME (adv-loc)

The prepositional adverbs appear in pairs:

LOC     |  TRANS
nede    |  ned
oppe    |  opp
ute      |  ut
inne     |  inn
hjemme |  hjem
borte    |  bort
fremme |  frem
her      |  hit
der      |  dit


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## bicontinental

NorwegianNYC said:


> The prepositional adverbs are often controlled by the verb type, meaning that a stative verb (which expresses a state of being) will trigger the location form, whereas a dynamic verb will trigger the transition form.
> 
> JEG GÅR HJEM > JEG (s) GÅR (v-dynamic) HJEM (adv-trans)
> JEG ER HJEMME > JEG (s) ER (v-stative) HJEMME (adv-loc)



Very nice answer, NNYC. (And I assume there are verbs that can be used either way, e.g. _jeg går hjem_ vs._ jeg går hjemme og_....)
Bic.


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## NorwegianNYC

Yes, and those are called mixed/dual-function/dynamic-stative verbs. In your example: _jeg går hjem_ means "I am walking home", whereas _jeg går hjemme_, means "I walk at home". [In the latter, you are walking around at the place you call home (house, city, country), but you are not walking to or towards the place you call home]


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## Ben Jamin

But aren't the words  "hjemme" and "hjem"also just substantives in not longer used declension cases? They are used as adverbs, but have they lost their substantiveness?

In Russian you also use quite analogous forms  *дома *and *домой , *but they are not called adverbs.


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## willem81

Ben Jamin, they are namely adverbs:
http://ru.wiktionary.org/wiki/дома 
http://ru.wiktionary.org/wiki/домой


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## Ben Jamin

willem81 said:


> Ben Jamin, they are namely adverbs:
> http://ru.wiktionary.org/wiki/дома
> http://ru.wiktionary.org/wiki/домой


Thanks, I didn't know that. At school we treated those words as nouns.


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## bicontinental

@ NNYC, Thanks for your answer (post #5)
  @ Ben Jamin. _Hjem_ is, as you know, also a noun, _et hjem, hjemmet,_ still in use today in Norwegian and Danish. The adverbial forms used today are “linguistic remnants” of the accusative (hjem) and dative (hjemme) forms of this noun. 

http://ordnet.dk/ods/ordbog?select=hjem,2&query=hjem
http://ordnet.dk/ods/ordbog?select=hjemme,3&query=hjemme
Bic


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## Ben Jamin

bicontinental said:


> @ NNYC, Thanks for your answer (post #5)
> @ Ben Jamin. _Hjem_ is, as you know, also a noun, _et hjem, hjemmet,_ still in use today in Norwegian and Danish. The adverbial forms used today are “linguistic remnants” of the accusative (hjem) and dative (hjemme) forms of this noun.
> 
> http://ordnet.dk/ods/ordbog?select=hjem,2&query=hjem
> http://ordnet.dk/ods/ordbog?select=hjemme,3&query=hjemme
> Bic


Yes, of course I know. 

I have problems understanding why "hjem" and "hjemme" have been classified as adverbs. 
I think that "Jeg er hjemme" can also be interpreted as consisting of a pronoun, a verb and a noun in a dependent case (albeit not used for other nouns). 
After all most adverbs describe a property of the action (like: I go fast, How do I go?), not a place when the action happens. We can't ask "How are you? and Answer "I am at home", can we?
The same applies to "Jeg går *hjem*". Both in Latin and in Finnish there will be a noun involved : "*Domum *eō" and "Kavelen *kotiin*", not an adverb.


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## willem81

Adverbs can describe not only the manner of action (how?), but time and space as well. Tomorrow, yesterday, now, then - those are adverbs of time (when?); astray, aside, near, far - those are adverbs of place which also include 'home' (where?).


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## Ben Jamin

willem81 said:


> Adverbs can describe not only the manner of action (how?), but time and space as well. Tomorrow, yesterday, now, then - those are adverbs of time (when?); astray, aside, near, far - those are adverbs of place which also include 'home' (where?).



But the words: *home*, *hjem*, *domum*, *kotiin, **домой *are ordinary nouns as well, aren't they? If they stand alone, you can't tell them from other nouns. It is also possible to analyze the sentence and treat them as nouns. 
In the Norwegian sentence "Bordet er reservert *gjestene*", gjestene is a noun, not an adverb, even if it is without a preposition, isn't it? (The noun *gjestene *works as if it was in the dative). *Kotiin *is a noun in illativus, the same you can say about *hjem*.


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## bicontinental

I understand what you’re saying, Ben Jamin, at least when it comes to the Latin analogy…(don’t know any Finnish). But as willem81 says, the adverbial family is big and both _hjem_ and _hjemme_ fall under adverbs of place, whereas in your example _I go fast_, the adverb ‘fast’ is one of manner. I would argue that also in Latin, “_Quo vadis?” “Vado domum_”, 'domum' has an adverbial function in that particular context, although, grammatically speaking, it represents the accusative case of ‘domus’, the same way that ‘hjem’ is a (rudimentary) accusative case of the corresponding noun;  (purists among linguists might disagree with me on that…)

Bic


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## willem81

To Ben Jamin:
Well, as for _домой_, today it does not look like an ordinary noun, the noun is дом, whereas none of the modern declension cases will give us the ending -ой. 
Д*о*ма may indeed look as a noun, as it coincides with the genetive case of "дом".
Also, not seldom the same word can belong to several parts of speech, in English a word can be both a noun, an adjective and a verb, therefore why can't a word be both a noun and an adverb?

Example from German: morgen - adverb, der Morgen - noun.


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## Ben Jamin

bicontinental said:


> I understand what you’re saying, Ben Jamin, at least when it comes to the Latin analogy…(don’t know any Finnish). But as willem81 says, the adverbial family is big and both _hjem_ and _hjemme_ fall under adverbs of place, whereas in your example _I go fast_, the adverb ‘fast’ is one of manner. I would argue that also in Latin, “_Quo vadis?” “Vado domum_”, 'domum' has an adverbial function in that particular context, although, grammatically speaking, it represents the accusative case of ‘domus’, the same way that ‘hjem’ is a (rudimentary) accusative case of the corresponding noun;  (purists among linguists might disagree with me on that…)
> 
> Bic


 I think that the same linguistic phenomenon can often be described in many ways, which all are correct.
For example: the construction of the type "*I am going to* eat", is described as separate tense in French ("je vais manger" - futur proche), while the same construction is not treated as a tense in English or Spanish. In Italian the grammaticians never bothered to classify the construction, and most Italians seriously think that "*vado*" in "vado a mangiare" is to be understood literally as "walking" (I had a thread about it at the Italian forum).


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## myšlenka

Ben Jamin said:


> I have problems understanding why "hjem" and "hjemme" have been classified as adverbs.
> I think that "Jeg er hjemme" can also be interpreted as consisting of a pronoun, a verb and a noun in a dependent case (albeit not used for other nouns).
> After all most adverbs describe a property of the action (like: I go fast, How do I go?), not a place when the action happens. We can't ask "How are you? and Answer "I am at home", can we?
> The same applies to "Jeg går *hjem*". Both in Latin and in Finnish there will be a noun involved : "*Domum *eō" and "Kavelen *kotiin*", not an adverb.


 The word class "adverb" comprises words with many different functions so I can understand the reluctancy to categorize _hjem/hjemme_ as an adverb, especially as the word pair is not proto-typical adverbs. However, categorizing _hjem/hjemme_ as nouns faces empirical problems:
1) Nouns are inflected for number, gender and definiteness in Norwegian. _Hjem/hjemme_ is not which means that they don't behave like nouns morphologically.
2) Nouns can be modified by adjectives and determiners. _Hjem/hjemme_ cannot which means that they don't behave like nouns syntactically.
3) If you classify _hjem/hjemme_ as nouns, you also should classify _bort/borte_, _frem/fremme_ etc as nouns as well. Otherwise you'll miss an entire generalization concerning morphology and the Loc/Trans alternation mentioned by NorwegianNYC in #3.

There is no doubt that _hjem/hjemme_ were nouns historically speaking, but classifying them as such in the synchronic grammar doesn't hold. Besides, whatever strategies Finnish and Latin use to express the same thing should not affect the labelling in Norwegian. When you express habituality in English, you use an adverb (_usually_), in Norwegian you can use a verb (_å pleie_).



Ben Jamin said:


> I think that the same linguistic phenomenon can often be described in many ways, which all are correct.
> For example: the construction of the type "*I am going to* eat", is described as separate tense in French ("je vais manger" - futur proche), while the same construction is not treated as a tense in English or Spanish. In Italian the grammaticians never bothered to classify the construction, and most Italians seriously think that "*vado*" in "vado a mangiare" is to be understood literally as "walking" (I had a thread about it at the Italian forum).


Given that it is the same linguistic phenomenon.


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## Ben Jamin

myšlenka said:


> Given that it is the same linguistic phenomenon.


Yes, this was the prerequisite.


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## Vanja

And what is the difference between syke*hjem* i syke*hjemme*?
_Jeg er lege på et sykehjem.
Jeg lærer mye av kollegaene på sykehjemmet._

Is this because of the definite form of the noun?


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## NorwegianNYC

It is not _syke*hjemme*_, but _syke*hjemmet*_.

et hjem - hjemmet - hjem - hjemmene

_Hjemmet_ is definite singular of _hjem_


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## Vanja

Oh, I see. Thanks.


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