Originally Posted by Briks

Yeah, we have the same problem in Norwegian. However, Norwegian really is two written languages. There's Bokmål, which basically is modified Danish, and also the one written most often. Then there's Nynorsk, which translates to Neo-Norwegian, and resulted from the work of some pissed-off poets back in the 1800s who thought that just writing a slightly different version of Danish wasn't worthy enough for them, so they rebelled by writing a couple of dialect words in their poems and plays (yes, that sparked a lot of controversy). The "father" of Nynorsk is Ivar Aasen, who travelled around the country collecting words, and made a new grammar system based on spoken dialects and sometimes even the Old Norse language.

To the point: In Norwegian we have three forms of nouns, called male, female and "neutral". In Bokmål there is close to no difference between male and female, and writers of Bokmål tend to only differentiate between the two while speaking. But in nynorsk there are three articles as opposed to two: "ein" for male, "ei" for female and "eit" for neutral. Also, instead of using a single word like "the" as a definite article, we use endings: "-en" for male, "-a" for female and "-et" for neutral. For the word "that", we use "den" when it's male or female and "det" when it's neutral, and for the word "this", we use "denne" when it's male or female and "dette" when it's neutral.

Just like in German, there's no logic behind which words are male, female or neutral, but according to my mother (who knows German), it's often the same words as in German. I've heard that Norwegian is really hard for immigrants to learn, and I think I know why.

Also, I'm pretty sure this is the longest post I've ever written on these forums that wasn't in the journal section, haha.