On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 15:41:40 -0700, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
No, Steve.
Bokmål and Nynorsk are not different written forms of the same spoken language, rather they are a separate tradition altogether.
Point Of View, and I beg to differ.
To make an analogy, if you and your friend both write "I'm not" in English, but one of you says "I aint" and the other "I am not" in your respective dialects (or sociolects), then all three are valid examples of the same language: English.
In much the same way, Norwegian is Norwegian, whether represented by written bokmål, written nynorsk, or some spoken dialect. It is all one and the same language, and I would agree with Stephen Forrest that nb and nn are just two orthographical notations (notably, the official ones) for that language.
Ulf Lunde