Characteristics of the Norwegian language in AX Semantics
Fundamentals
In Norwegian, you need to know the gender of a noun to form (together with number and case) the accompanying adjectives, determiners, numerals, and pronouns correctly.
Norwegian has four genders for nouns: masculine, feminine, neuter, and common. There are two numbers: singular and plural. Additionally, Norwegian has nominative and genitive case for nouns.
| grammatical name | values | examples |
|---|---|---|
| gender | masculine | den herlige hunden (the lovely dog) |
| feminine | den herlige jenta (the lovely girl) | |
| neuter | det gamle huset (the old house) | |
| common | den gamle klokken (the old watch) | |
| number | singular | ny klokke (new watch) |
| plural | nye klokker (new watches) | |
| cases (noun) | nominative | forkle (apron) |
| genitive | forkles | |
| adjectives (noun) | before noun | rødt eple (red apple) |
| verb tenses | present | han går (he goes) |
| past | han gikk (he went) |
The standard order of a noun phrase in Norwegian is the following:
preposition + determiner + numeral + adjective + noun
See for example:
om disse tre populære bøkene
about these three popular books[pl]
PREP DET NUM ADJ NOUN
"about these three popular books"
Lexicon
Nouns
Norwegian nouns are inflected for number (singular/plural), case (nominative/genitive), and definiteness (indefinite/definite). When the lexicon entry is missing, the NLG platform will firstly try to find the most probable gender based on heuristics. However, nouns should be added to the lexicon with their grammatical gender if they do not inflect regularly.
Lexicon entries for nouns may also be necessary for inflecting determiners, adjectives and pronouns correctly. They are omitted, if a lexicon entry is required, but missing.
Examples
The basic lexicon entry for beskytter (guardian) contains:
- gender: masculine
- inflection table for case and number:
| Singular | Plural | |
|---|---|---|
| Nominative | beskytter | beskyttere |
| Genitive | beskytterens | beskytternes |
Note
If you need lexicon entries for countries, write to the support about that and you will get them for Norwegian with automatic handling of prepositions.
Adjectives
In the lexicon, the inflection table for gender, case, number and definiteness can be encoded. For adjective position, the default is "before noun".
Verbs
The most common verbs are encoded in our software. If a verb inflects incorrectly, you should add it to the lexicon.
Container settings
Numerals
The noun will automatically agree with the numeral number when a numeral variable is used. Four types of numerals are possible on the AX NLG platform: cardinal, cardinal as digit, ordinal, and ordinal as digit.
| cardinal | ordinal | |
|---|---|---|
| text | ni dager (nine days) | den niende dagen (the ninth day) |
| digit | 9 dager (9 days) | den 9. dagen (the 9th day) |
For Norwegian, both cardinal and ordinal numerals are written out until 12, otherwise (above 12) the output is in digit form. Take cardinal numerals for example:
tolv biler
(twelve cars)
13 biler
(13 cars)
Determiners
The AX NLG platform supports the following determiners for Norwegian: definite, indefinite, demonstrative, relative, and possessive.
The definite article in Norwegian is mostly expressed by a suffix on the noun. An additional definite article is only added to noun phrases with adjectives or numerals, see for example:
flaske (bottle)
vs.
flasken (the bottle)
vs.
den nye flasken (the new bottle)
Preposition switch
On the AX NLG platform, the settings for the container Tyskland (Germany) are: preposition="i" and case="nom".
i Tyskland
(in Germany)
For the below sentence with a different place (i.e. Island), the platform settings are the same as above (preposition="in", case="nom"), but the lexical information changes the preposition and shows a switch from i to på:
på Island
(on Iceland)
Language Variants
There are two official forms of written Norwegian, Bokmål (literally "book tongue") and Nynorsk ("new Norwegian"). The AX NLG platform supports Norwegian Bokmål as it is the preferred written standard in Norway. (Contact the support team if you are interested in using Nynorsk.)