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Comment by jernfrost | Hacker News Reader

These mistakes don’t just run from native language to foreign language. Any time you know more than one language you will end up screwing up the other in some way.

I am a native Norwegian speaker and it annoys me how many things we say in Norwegian adopted from english which makes no sense in Norwegian.

We translate the english: “let us go for it” to “la oss gå for det” but that literally means “let us walk for it”

I got bilingual kids and they screw up both languages. Norwegian grammar sneaks into english and english grammar and idioms sneak into their Norwegian. Neithet language is really spoken correctly

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Same in German. A lot of people say "Das macht Sinn", which is a literal translation of "That makes sense." But "Sinn machen" is implausible in German because "machen" is more like "to manufacture".

I used to get worked up over it, but I talked to a linguist about it and he encouraged me to just let it go: That's just how languages develop.

You might be interested in this five-part series on this expression that meticoulsy lays out that (even though it might be an import from English) it fits perfectly well into how such expressions are constructed in German and it isn't really implausible (especially in the third post).

https://www.iaas.uni-bremen.de/sprachblog/2007/10/01/sinnesf...

I wonder if English and Norwegian is even easier to mess up between them, than say Swedish and English. I have often thought that English and Norwegian seem closer to each other than Swedish and English, even though Norwegian and Swedish also are very very similar.

I am thinking of things like "great" and "accurate" and a lot of other words which are basically the same in Norwegian and English.

There are a lot of cognates between English and Swedish too of course, but often you have traverse the language a bit farther to find the root, and often there are subtle differences in meaning.

Purblind being my current favorite - meaning completely blind in Swedish and the same in English - but only archaic language! In contemporary English it apparently means "partly blind".

Besided, I really wonder about your example. "Låt gå för det" is a totally Swedish expression, AFAIK it's not translated from English. To my ears, it's a bit archaic, which would rather suggest that this idiom has a common germanic parent for both English and Swedish.

Remember, English got a LOT of its shape from Old Norse. (From Norwegians and Danes.)

> We translate the english: “let us go for it” to “la oss gå for det” but that literally means “let us walk for it”

"la oss gå for det" seems like a direct translation but "vi går for den" seems more natural, don't you think? Like metaphorically marching towards some goal?

/Lived in Norway 15+ years, Norwegian wife and kids, English is not my native language

"låt gå för det" (Which is easily short for "låt [oss] gå för det") -->

I found a usage from 1912, before English was a great influence on Swedish:

https://litteraturbanken.se/forfattare/SoderbergH/titlar/Den...

Nice find!

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