# Norwegian: Her er deilig og skyggefuldt



## Arrius

In the little book I learnt my Norwegian from, I came upon the above sentence translated as *It's nice and shady here* in which_ *nice and* _is used as a kind of adverb of degree like _*quite*._ I had hitherto regarded _nice and + adjective _as a rather strange and uniquely English construction. But is this really the same construction in Norwegian (and possibly also the other Nordic languages) or just two adjectives joined by *og,* i.e. _it is (both) pleasant and shady here,_ or can one also translate _these boots are nice and big_ and _I feel nice and warm_ in the same way_?_ If so, then it is possible that the invading and colonizing Danes gave this peculiar construction to English, since it does not exist in either German or Dutch.


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## Lemminkäinen

Are you sure you mean Norwegian and not Danish? The Norwegian spelling would be _skyggefullt_. I would say it's simply a case of two adjectives describing a place ("pleasant and shady").


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## Arrius

The book I have is definitely intended to be for Norwegian, but it was published by Hugo before WW II. In the foreword, it says that previously one single book was issued for the two languages. In mine, alternatives such as _bog/bok_ are given and _aa_ is used instead of _å,_ which does not appear at all.  Have no fear: I have downloaded various useful modern items from our Sources Forum. However, since I never expect to have more than a passive, reading knowledge of Norwegian, it does not particularly matter that the spelling I am mainly familiar with is archaic and helps me to read Danish too.

It would appear then that the construction _nice and shady_ is not mirrored in Norwegian after all - or in any other language for that matter. Mange tak,  Arrius


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## missTK

I actually disagree. I think this particular example is, at best, a borderline example of the "nice and shady" type of construction, but there are other examples in Norwegian.

For example, "Det er godt og varmt her" and variants, which you hear all the time. I would consider "Det er godt her" so strange as to be almost ungrammatical, so I don't think you can consider that one "just two adjectives together". And I think I use "god og..." myself to mean "quite...." sometimes.


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## oskhen

missTK said:


> I actually disagree. I think this particular example is, at best, a borderline example of the "nice and shady" type of construction, but there are other examples in Norwegian.
> 
> For example, "Det er godt og varmt her" and variants, which you hear all the time. I would consider "Det er godt her" so strange as to be almost ungrammatical, so I don't think you can consider that one "just two adjectives together". And I think I use "god og..." myself to mean "quite...." sometimes.


 



I agree witt missTK, I think. Take the expression "god og mett", for instance. Or did I misunderstand?


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## Arrius

Ah ha! So my suspicions were correct after all. Does the _godt og varmt_ construction occur in all the Nordic languages then, including Icelandic, which our moderator writes his title in, though his nickname seems to be Finnish and his nationality Norwegian? If so, it would appear that English got it from the Danes as I surmised in the time of Alfred the Great, since we certainly didn't get it from the Norman French. 
As for _god og mett_,I don't think any form of English has _good and tired_ (??), but Americans especially often say "_I'll do it when I'm good and ready_".
PS I have repeated _good and tired_ to myself several times and in fact it does seem familiar in BE: "The littl'un's good and tired. Put him straight to bed"


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## oskhen

Arrius said:


> As for _god og mett_,I don't think any form of English has _good and tired_ (??), but Americans especially often say "_I'll do it when I'm good and ready_".


 
Shouldn't _mett_ be translated with _full_, as in filled with food, and not _tired? _Or does _tired_ have meanings I'm not aware of?


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## Arrius

Of course you're right, I know that the normal word for tired is _trøtt (traet_ in my old book, I believe) , but I looked up_ mett_ and was misled by the Spanish translation which meant literally _to be able to do no more; to be full_ was also given as the English, but I didn't notice. _Tired_ doesn't have any secondary meaning.
Be that as it may, we seem to hve established that our languages share this construction with _and/og._


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## Forero

Is this construction actually hendiadys?  Hendiadys is a figure of speech in which two phrases connected by a conjunction are used to express something that would normally be expressed by one modifying the other.  For example:

"Sound and fury" for "furious sound". [Macbeth]
"In the gross and scope of my opinion" for "in the gross scope of my opinion". [Hamlet]
"In the dead vast and middle of the night". [Hamlet]
"A nipping and an eager air" for "An eagerly nipping air". [Hamlet]


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## Arrius

I had never heard the name of this figure of speech before, but all your examples of hendiadys are literary and, at least in part, determined by the exigences of the metre, whereas _nice and warm_ is colloquial everyday speech.  Perhaps _I have become_ _an older and a wiser man_ is an example of hendiadys in normal speech, but I am not sure if any of these are on the same pattern as _nice and warm_ or _god og mett where the first part merely intensifies the second and does not introduce a separate concept._


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