I had posted this message to Hnolt as a private message but in HNOLTS reply he indicated it should be posted to the forum. The following is my message followed by the reply
Hi Hnolt
I am attempting to learn Nynorn by using your online lessons. I have a very limited knowledge of Old Norse, and Faroese and a somewhat greater knowledge of Old English. I am aware of your attempt to revive Norn and I am interested in learning Nynorn.
Anyway I find your lessons quite clear and easy to follow. However one of my early problems is how to determine substantive noun classes strong and weak and type 1 and 2. You indicate in the lessons to check the dictionary. I assume you mean Jakobsen's dictionary.
The only dictionary I have access to is the online one at
http://nornlanguage.x10.mx/index.php?nynorn_dic which lists the nouns as m, f and n but does not indicate whether they are strong or weak or class 1 or 2 and what are the plural forms of the nouns.
Another problem I can see with reviving Norn is that the online dictionary is good for fishing, farming, weather and personal terms but is lacking modern terms ie it is still in the 17th century. However I am sure you are aware of that and have a plan to modernize the vocabulary.
Rogapl
Hi Rogapl,
Thank you for your message and for your interest in Nynorn in general!
I'm glad that you find the tutorial clear and comprehensible, this was my primary goal, to keep things simple and informative at the same time. In fact you're the first person who's telling me they are using the tutorial, which is much appreciated!
As for our dictionary, it is based on Jakob Jakobsen's etymological dictionary of (the real) Norn, which mostly includes fishery/farming/meteorological terms. Developing a new modern terminology is a very hard work, but we've already started working on it. You can see some up-to-date texts in Nynorn on our homepage, one of which has got a bit of mathematical terminology. Currently I'm re-working the code of the whole website and I plan to put all these new words into the dictionary as well as update the grammatical info, such as declension types and other grammar keys.
I can just tell you right now, that in many cases these types are the same as in Old Norse/Faroese, so meanwhile you could use grammatical information in the dictionaries of these languages for all respective words. Normally strong masculine words would belong to the 'hest' class and strong feminine to 'ferd'. Other classes don't have so many variations.
Of course, updating the dictionary will take a lot of time and effort whilst I and the other guys in our project can't afford working on it on full-time basis. So the development is going on in a rather relaxed way, slowly but surely. You will certainly see more updates by the summer time, I hope.
I also recommend you to post your thoughts and questions about the tutorial in the respective thread on the forum, where we will try to help you... as much as such an undeveloped language as Nynorn will allow it