# Norwegian: port til / inngang til



## sukepeth

I have a 20-year-old Norwegian student who wrote "We tend to use books as a port to an imaginary world."  What I want to find out is why this person wrote "port", which is rather unusual in English (here I'd prefer a word like "gateway").  I would guess that the person  would have said "port til" in Norwegian and simply transferred this to English.  But Norwegian also has the phrase "inngang til," which is much more common when I google the two phrases.  It looks to me like both phrases can be used with both concrete and abstract entities.  
Would "inngang til" also be a possibility here if I were to back-translate the sentence?  What's the difference between "port til" and "inngang til"?  I have a friend who thinks that "inngang til" is a bit old-fashioned and that young people just wouldn't say it.  
Any theories?


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## kirsitn

Inngang = entry, entrance
Port = gate, gateway

Both options sound ok to me.


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## sukepeth

Yes, thanks. I know they both sound ok, and I know what the two words mean. But is there _any _difference in usage?  Why would someone prefer one over the other? Why does _inngang til_ seem to occur more frequently? I'd like to be able to tease apart the distinction.


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## solregn

sukepeth said:


> Yes, thanks. I know they both sound ok, and I know what the two words mean. But is there _any _difference in usage?  Why would someone prefer one over the other? Why does _inngang til_ seem to occur more frequently? I'd like to be able to tease apart the distinction.



I don't know if it's the same in Norweigan, but in Swedish you would mainly use _ingång_ for any entrance to a building, while _port _could be the entrance door to a residential building (e.g. in compound words as _portvakt_ and _portkod_), but also to a castle (_slottsport_) or used in a figurative sense, for example as a "portal" to another world.


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## Wilma_Sweden

sukepeth said:


> But Norwegian also has the phrase "inngang til," which is much more common when I google the two phrases.


I would assume that your student felt that 'port' was more abstract than 'inngang', so if he/she was unaware of 'gateway', presumably 'port' was the closest thing to hand. If the student were Swedish, you would possibly have found him/her using 'portal', as this is the main abstract 'gateway' in Swedish. Don't forget that some word choices from EFL students are completely random, based on their current personal active vocabulary and/or 'form factor', i.e. being stressed, tired or hung over can seriosly affect your language skills and attention span! 

I started googling the Norwegian phrases, but also got a lot of Danish hits, and a jumbled mixture of concrete and abstract uses. From those hits, I concluded that it would be far too time-consuming for me to draw any safe conclusions about abstract vs. concrete uses of inngang/port in both languages, and their respective frequency. I would have searched a Norwegian corpus instead, where I would at least be guaranteed Norwegian hits only.

/Wilma


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## Pteppic

Inngang has a more general meaning than port, which I suppose might account for the more numerous google hits. In this context, I personally find port more appealing - "inngang" isn't exactly wrong, but to me an inngang to an imaginary world sounds a bit too prosaic, like glass doors beneath a sign reading "Imaginary world", possibly leading into a foyer with elevators and a desk clerk.


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## Huffameg

It is in no way strange to use "inngang", specially when it comes to books. To say that a book is an "inngang" to something, a field of study, a topic, a method etc., is quite common. However, this depends heavily on the level of abstractness. In this context one could just as well use "portal" in norwegian but that might quickly be interpreted as A Never Ending Story-kind of thing.. 

In my opinion "port" is, as someone already has pointed out, more concrete and doesn't sound well ("bøker er ein port til ei fantasiverd").


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## sukepeth

Thanks so much for your replies!
The port/inngang preference must be very very individual. Pteppic likes "port" better, but I have friends who say they would only use "inngang".  Thanks for the wonderful "glass doors" image, btw.
Wilma Sweden: Thanks for taking the time to check in Google. I look in a Norwegian corpus called the Bokmålskorpus. I found 2 hits of "port til", all collocating with abstract entities:   rikdom, en ny verden, befrielse. I found 47 hits of "inngang til", 42 of which collocated with abstract entities while the remaining 5 were all literal.  
I've also thought about your comment about some mistakes being purely random, but it doesn't seem to fit with my data. I've investigated 20000 words of Norwegian English, and I haven't yet found anything that I can't somehow explain.  I agree that a person can just make a mistake - a slip - because they're tired or something, but even such slips are based on something logical, whether it be a typo or L1 interference, etc. They're not just words out of the blue. Maybe you were referring to the difference between systematic errors and simple mistakes?  
And Huffameg, you refer to "level of abstractness". How interesting!  How does one measure the different levels, mon tro?
Sorry, sorry. I've strayed off-topic, but you've all given me something to chew on.


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## Wilma_Sweden

sukepeth said:


> I look in a Norwegian corpus called the Bokmålskorpus. I found 2 hits of "port til", all collocating with abstract entities:   rikdom, en ny verden, befrielse. I found 47 hits of "inngang til", 42 of which collocated with abstract entities while the remaining 5 were all literal.


That's a much more manageable amount of data! Google is just not workable for such linguistic research. 


> I've also thought about your comment about some mistakes being purely random, but it doesn't seem to fit with my data. I've investigated 20000 words of Norwegian English, and I haven't yet found anything that I can't somehow explain.  I agree that a person can just make a mistake - a slip - because they're tired or something, but even such slips are based on something logical, whether it be a typo or L1 interference, etc. They're not just words out of the blue. Maybe you were referring to the difference between systematic errors and simple mistakes?


That's looks like some serious research - are you looking at syntax errors as well, or just vocabulary? What is your thesis statement? Are you finding that most errors can be explained by L1 interference? Are you considering correct words in inappropriate places (collocation errors), or the use of one correct synonym vs. the other, as well as 'pure' errors such as port instead of gateway?

In any case, I interpreted your question as though the use of 'port' was a single accidental mistake by one student rather than a systematic error committed by many students. This is why I brought up tiredness or individual active vocabulary as possible causes for one word choice or the other. Obviously, no two L2 students aquire their active vocabulary in exactly the same order or manner, which might account for their choice of translation equivalent, be it correct or not. 

/Wilma


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