Questions about pronunciation that cannot be inferred from Norwegian orthography

[Tegze3]

I try to learn Norwegian by reading the CLUE series of Jørn Lier Horst. But there is a problem: I cannot find the pronunciation of a lot of words.

So, as other posts already pointed out, Norwegian is a language with two written standards but no spoken standard assigned to any of them, which is an enviable policy. On the other hand, the orthographic system is close phonemic (compared to which variety, is a great question, in light of the first sentence, but it's probably Urban East Norwegian). As a consequence, most dictionaries don't list pronunciations, either to avoid prescribing one dialect's pronunciation over another or because they feel that it's obvious from spelling. Which is not.

And it's not a great help for language learners, especially like me, who prefer to learn languages as mostly logical systems, whith phonemes as basic building blocks. I also think that the spoken language is the "original", and the written language merely tries to represent it (with more or less success). (The opposite can also happen, that's called spelling pronunciation, and usually is a form of hypercorrection, and from what I read, the Bokmål side of the language maybe started as pronouncing written Danish in a Norwegian way, oversymplifying the situation, but that's another story.) This also means, that I would be more than happy to learn to speak in any dialect - in fact, I started learning Bergensk first (and also developed an Australian accent in English consciously)-, but sadly enough, Bokmål with an Urban East Norwegian pronunciation has the most resources, including Duolingo, so I had to stick to it.

However phonemic Bokmål orthography looks, it doesn't mark 1) the stressed syllable 2) the tone of the word, 3) when the letter ⟨e⟩'s pronunciation reduces to /ə/ and 4) the length of vowels at all. It has the means to, but marks inconsistently 5) the sounds /o/ and /u/ with the letter ⟨o⟩, 6) the sounds /u/ and /ʉ/ with the letter ⟨o⟩, 7) the sounds ⟨e,æ⟩ by either of the letters [e,æ], 8) the length of consonants (mostly in the case of word final ⟨m⟩, e.g. ⟨kom⟩=/komː/, a lot of other things, probably for etymological reasons, for example 9) ⟨d⟩, ⟨g⟩, ⟨t⟩ are inconsistently silent in certain enviroments or ⟨g⟩ is pronounced /j/ or /ŋ/ unexpectedly 10) and there are loandwords spelled in a foreign way as well. The retroflex sounds are hopefully predictable, except the 'tykk l' /ɽ/, which is maybe avoided in educated speech.

Based on what I read and observed, my theory is that 2) tone, 4) long vowels and 8) long consonants are properties of 1) the stressed syllable, so they cannot appear outside the stressed syllable and the stressed syllable must have either of the two tones and either a long vowel or a long consonant. On the other hand 3) can only appear outside stressed sillables. This means, that if I mark a long consonant or a vowel with a ':' put after them, this will be the stressed syllable with tone 1. If it's tone 2, I can use ';' instead. Example: 'Gut:ten læ;rer sam:men me:d jen;ta.'

Since the original text is mostly phonemic, one doesn't have to use IPA to rewrite the whole text. You can modify the original by small signs and diacritics where the spelling of a word is inconsistent or insufficient, so that both the pronunciation and the original orthography is recovereble. For example, I can use a dot under a consonant to denote, that it's retroflex, e.g. 'barṇ'. I can put silent letters into angle brackets: 'Han: sel;⟨g⟩er ḷan:⟨d⟩e⟨t⟩'. In the opposite case, when a sound is pronounced but not written, I can use angle brackets: 'oran:[g]sje'. You can combine the two brackets, when a part of the word is pronounced differently than written: 'p⟨en⟩[ang]sjona:t'. For the most commont combinations, its convenient to make new symbols:
⟨o⟩[å]=ò, ⟨u⟩[o]=ù, ⟨e⟩[æ]=è, ⟨g⟩[j]=ġ. If a letters pronunciation is optional, I use parentheses, and I use [ŧ] at the end of neuter definite nouns, since they are pronounced in the genitive: 'ste:(d)eŧ', 'ste:(d)eŧs'.

In the cases that are not ambiguous, I stick to the original Norwegian orthography, for example the combinations: tj, sj, skj, lj, hj, hv; kj, ki, ky; gj, gi, gy; skj, ski, sky.

The different pronunciations of ⟨e⟩ are more complicated. When it's reduced, I use [ə], if it's absorbed in the following consonant making it syllabic, I use [']. When it turns to /æ/ in front of ⟨r⟩, I write [è]. I don't know the exact rule to these changes, so I have to mark them every time they happen.

Okay, sorry, it's quite a lot of text, I don't know how to make it more compact. The main thing is, this is the part in front of the CLUE book, where the main characters are introduced, with the pronunciation indicated:

###########################################################

Cecilia Gaathe bo:r på Pè;rḷ'ṇ p⟨en⟩[ang]sjona:t sam:m'n me:⟨d⟩ fa:r'ṇ ṣin, Alan W. Gaathe, som: ei;ər ṣṭe:(d)əŧ. Mo:r'ṇ ṣin, Iselin Gaathe, drùk;nət på mys:tisk vi:s i Skutebukta fòr;r⟨i⟩ġə sòm;mər.

Leo Bast ha:r ṇet:tòpp flyt;tət til: Skutebukta. Han: bo:r i den priva:tə de:lən av p⟨en⟩[ang]sjona:təŧ sam:m'n me:⟨d⟩ mo:r'ṇ ṣin, Rebekka, sòm: è:r ṇy:an:satt i stil;lingən sòm: hotel:lsje:f. Fòrel:drənə han:s è:r skil:t. Fa:r'ṇ è:r [s]jo⟨u⟩rṇalis:t ò⟨g⟩ bo:r i Dubai.

Une Flaker bo:r ṣam:m'n me:⟨d⟩ fòrel:drənə ò⟨g⟩ d⟨e⟩[i]: to: brø;drənə si;nə i et gam;m'lt skip:pərhu:s på øs:tsi;d'n av Skutebukta. Dè:r ha:r hun: bod:d bestan:di⟨g⟩. Fa:r'ṇ, Widar Flaker, è:r fi;skər, men:s mo:r'ṇ è:r ḷæ;rər på sko;l'n in;nə i by:ən.

Egon è:r hun:⟨d⟩'n til: Une. Den he;tər Egon fòrḍi: den è:r ṣå e;g'n ò⟨g⟩ sta:, ò⟨g⟩ sto:rṭ ṣet:t gjø:r ṣòm: den vil:. Deŧ è:r en kne:høy: blan;⟨d⟩ingshun:⟨d⟩, me:⟨d⟩ bru:n, krøl;lətə pel:s, lan:g ha;lə ò⟨g⟩ vå:t snu;tə. Deŧ si;əs at han: stam;mər fra: en politi:hun:⟨d⟩.

Pè;rḷ'ṇ p⟨en⟩[ang]sjona:t
P⟨en⟩[ang]sjona:təŧ Pè;rḷ'ṇ ble: byg;gət av Cecilias tip:pòldəfa:r fòr: ò:vər hun;drə å:r ṣi;d'n. Den gan:gən kòm: gjes;t'nə me:⟨d⟩ dam:pbå:t til: dy:pvan:nskai:a, el:lər me:d jè:rnba;n'n til: by:ən ò⟨g⟩ vi;dərə dèr:fra til: kys:t'n me:⟨d⟩ hes:t ò⟨g⟩ kjèr:rə. Un:⟨d⟩ər kri:g'n ble: ei;əndòm'n tat:t av tys:kərṇə, sòm: lo:t òfise:r'ṇə si;nə bo: dè:r. Et;tərpå: ha:r ḍeŧ vært: fle:rə fòrskjel:li⟨g⟩ə ei;ərə he:lt til: mo:r'ṇ ò⟨g⟩ fa:r'ṇ ṭil: Cecilia kjøp;tə deŧ tilba:;kə, pus;sət deŧ òp:p ò⟨g⟩ begyn:tə å lei;ə deŧ u:t til: gjes;tər. Cecilia ò⟨g⟩ fa:r'ṇ bo:r i en priva:t de:l i an;drə eta:sjə på p⟨en⟩[ang]sjona:təŧ. Deŧ sam;mə gjø:r Ḷeo ò⟨g⟩ mo:r'ṇ. Høy:t ò:vər res:t'n av p⟨en⟩[ang]sjona:təŧ ra;gər ṭå:rṇvæ;r{əls/'ḷṣ}əŧ.

###########################################################

I looked up the words from the site of (NAOB)[https://naob.no/], which only provides the pronunciations of base words, and not their inflected forms such as definite or plural forms, or compound words. I heard that exactly those words have tone 2, which were multisillabic in Old Norse, so I guessed, that the plural form of words and definite form of adjectives must have tone 2, but not the definite forms of nouns, which is the same as what this source says. This is why I also think that loanwords have tone 1, no matter how inflected. In the case of compound words, I have no idea, so I just wrote the pronunciation of their components, and underlined them. I wouldn't be surprized if they retained their long vowels and consonants even after the stress gets removed from one of the components.

Verbs seem a bit more complicated, the infinitive of most have tone 2, but prefixed verbs seem to have tone 1. I don't know about the inflected forms like present, past, passive and preteritum, however. They are in bold.

Also, I didn't mark the pronunciation of these short unstressed words frequently appearing in the text:

på(:) i(:) den:/d(ə)n de:ŧ/dəŧ e:n/ən et(:) a(:)(v) ò(:)⟨g⟩ så(:) at(:) ṣi{:n/n:}

and I have no idea how to pronounce these proper names:

⟨Cecilia Gaathe⟩?[Səsi:liə Gå;tə]
⟨Alan W. Gaathe⟩?[Ala:n Dåb:'ltve: Gå;te]
⟨Iselin Gaathe⟩?[Isəli:n Gå;tə]
⟨Leo Bast⟩?[Le:å Bas:t]
⟨Rebekka⟩?[Rəbek:ka]
⟨Une Flaker⟩?[U;nə Fla;kər]
⟨Widar Flaker⟩?[Vi;(d)ar Fla;kər]
⟨Egon⟩?[E:gån]
⟨Skutebukta⟩?[Sku;təbuk:ta]
⟨Dubai⟩?[Dubai:]

So, I mainly need your feedback about my theories, if there are any mistakes in the text (even if you think it's only a typo), and mainly, the pronunciations of compound words and names and inflected words. After this long text, I'm pretty sure I left out something important, so ask, if something is not clear. Although my question is mainly about Urban East Norwegian, I'm also interested in other dialects, actually, but of course, they will work according to a different system. Also, if you have any advice for formatting, let me know.

[Olav]

Try the audio book.
https://www.lydbok.com/salamandergaten/

[Vlot Vlaams]

You wanted some feedback.

I don't understand "I cannot find the pronunciation of a lot of words." you mean in some written notation? or a real-voice spoken example? or do you mean "I don't know how to write down their pronunciation" ?

Maybe have one (of the two free) trial lesson with a Norvegian speaker on Italki. When I take Italki lessons, at times I write a text in the language I am learning, have it corrected and read aloud by the tutor. They record, and send me the MP3 or WAV file. So I can play/repeat as many times till I reproduce the same sounds.

Looking at your unknown ones. If I just pick one:
⟨Cecilia Gaathe⟩?[Səsi:liə Gå;tə]
Q: How can it be that the (for me) three different sounds - e in "Ce-", a in "-ia" and e in "-te" are noted with the same "ə"

Also: can it be that you "overcomplicate" things, by learning the language trying to read a phonetical representation of any of the spoken variations? Should one not rather just listen as much as possible to all sorts of spoken sources, and be submerged by the sounds and accents and fluctuations of intonation and rhythm of what you hear. You'll pick that up, automatically, sooned or later.

Looking at your signature, clearly NO is not the first language you learned. Did you use the same method for their pronunciation?

In any case, trying to explain pronunciations via some written media is imo not productive and a source of endless discussions on "what variation one is trying to write". What you write, anything you write as a notation, will be read/pronounced differently by every reader here. If I say "it sounds like "sh" ... what does it mean? How does a Swede read my "sh", or a Dutch person with no knowledge of English, or an American student, or a person from the Far East.

Or if I write "it sounds like ki..." a Swede will say "sh" or "ch" (as in kilometer)

So writing some phonetic presentation, be it even IPA or not, will not be a unique "sound" for the reader unless one specifices the "voice/language" it has to be read with. I have seen notations like "would" sounds like EN: wood, but what if the reader doesn't speak English well and correctly? and what would be "correct" anyway.

Some Norvegian speaker like SansEspoir may reply here too, but how is this member supposed to explain in written a correct sound? Unless it's recorded and pasted as an attachment to a reply here.

[SansEspoir]

Some Norvegian speaker like SansEspoir may reply here too, but how is this member supposed to explain in written a correct sound? Unless it's recorded and pasted as an attachment to a reply here.

Honestly this is too technical for me to understand. I'm of course willing to record some soundfiles if needed, but I'm not sure if I understand the issue at all.

What I can say, is that norwegian seems a lot harder for foreigners than for instance swedish does. Even though swedish also has some dialects, and it's easy to spot a foreign speaker, the foreigners seems to learn quicker, make fewer mistakes and get understood faster than in Norway. The swedish dialects are less varied than the norwegian ones, though, and I thin that might help in the process.

[Tegze3]

[EDIT]
This turned out to be a very long post again. If you feel in danger of getting bored (which I don't blame you for), please skip this post. The next post is more important for me, and I don't want you to lose interest.
[/EDIT]

Thank you for your answers @Olaf and @Vlot Vlaams!

As for the audiobook, I already have it, but the reader speaks too quickly to determine the pronunciation of most individual words. Since then, I tried to slow down it a bit, which helped, especially in the case of tone 1 and tone 2, but I still would need to have a control, to test, that what I heard is correct, because I'm still not confident enough in telling the difference between the two, not to mention other aspects of Norwegian phonology. And the quality of the sound deteriorates when slowed down.

My method is to first listen to the whole book, just to get used to the sound of the language. This will be a model to imitate when speaking, similarly, when you imitate an elderly speaker or someone with a specific speech defect in the theater, for example.
The second stage is reading through the book, just to see, how much you understand of it. I got the main plot of the story, probably because of the two other germanic languages I had learnt before and the minimal amount of Duolingo.
Now comes the part, where I go through the book systematically, making a dictionary of the words. I find and memorize their pronunciation and find patterns e.g. in the conjugation of irregular verbs without much effort, as a side effect of the process, after categorizing, making hypotheses, etc. It's a bit like a scientific research or solving a puzzle. I read most of the sentences aloud to enhance my pronunciation and talking skills in the process.
The last part will be listening for the whole story again, to see, how much I understand, to actually help my listening skills.

The thing is, usually, when people immerse themselves in languages whithout previous knowledge, they also do something similar. Making hypotheses about how the language works and about the basic sounds, the phonemes of the language. But what they perceive to be important is mostly based on their first language. For example, if I hadn't read about it before, I would probably never realized on my own that there are two tones, or that the sounds usually denoted by the letters ⟨i⟩ and ⟨y⟩ are actually different. On the other hand, I hear differences, that are not that important for a native speaker. E.g. I sometimes hear the ending ⟨-er⟩ to sound like /ir/, especially after the consonants /k,g/, like ⟨snakker⟩=/snakkir/, but ⟨spiser⟩=/spisər/. If I wouldn't know from beforehand that these aren't important differences, just the allophones (positional variants) of the same sound (phoneme), I would have to come up with a theory about why some verbs end in /ir/ in the present tense while most end in /ər/.

To avoid this, my strategy is learning what distinctions native speakers think are important, i. e. which distinctions can change the meaning of words (these distinct sounds are called phonemes), and what distinctions are predictable by the position of a certain phoneme in a word (allophones) or are by sociolinguistic factors (accents, age, class). After learning which distinctions are important in theory, I can carefully listen to the words differentiated by them, so I can also master them in practice, since I know what to pay attention to. Mastering the "not important" distinctions, on the other hand, won't help me (much) understand native speakers better -- it will help me to sound more like a native, however.

Of course, in linguistics nothing is clear cut, these categories can sometimes blend into each other, and eventually, that's how languages evolve, by elevating "not important", predictable features on the rank of "important", distinctive features. Probably that's what is happening/has happened to Norwegian retroflex consonants. But they are useful (to me), when learning languages.

I hope I explained my motivations. I also have to add, that this learning method would probably be to boring and shy away others who are mainly interested in communicating, it's motivating for me, since I'm not only interested in the language, but linguistics as well.

As for the other languages, I was taught German and English in formal education. English words were (in my case at that time) and are (generally) accompanied by written information on pronunciation in textbooks and dictionaries (usually IPA). The teacher didn't really stressed them and the other students clearly ignored it, and some of them probably speaks English better than me, but most of them probably still can't tell or hear the difference between 'bet' and 'bat'. And I listened to countless scientific talks by people with otherwise great scientific knowledge and fluent English with perfect grammar, save for an ununderstandable pronunciation. Later, I enhanced my pronunciation in English and German by reading phonetic representations and listening to audio, and sometimes, inventing shorthands to signal pronunciations. And this is how I switched to Australian accent later.
In the case of Esperanto, I didn't need such, because Esperanto orthography is perfectly phonemic.
In the case of Chinese, I had no other option, than looking for phonetic representations of a given character. Luckily, it has an official one, pinyin. But the "important distincions" in Chinese and my mother tongue, Hungarian, are totally different, obviously four tones, and ⟨j,q,zh,ch⟩ all sound the same for Hungarians, or e.g. ⟨b,p⟩ are both voiceless in Chinese and the difference is aspiration, while ⟨b,p⟩ are both unaspirated in Hungarian and the difference is voicedness (while in English, German, Norwegian, the difference is both in aspration and voicedness), and some of the people who started to learn Chinese with me and speak quite well, still trouble with this distinction only because they didn't know what to pay attention to.
In the case of Romanian, I mostly learned it without audio source, and the original orthography is kind of phonemic, but doesn't mark stress and whether ⟨u⟩ and ⟨i⟩ are vowels or semivowels (are they in a separate syllable or part of a diphtong). So this was the information I searched for in dictionaries and one of my language books even sygnalled it in the text (underlying for stress and italics for semivowels). When I actually found a Romanian teacher, she said my pronunciation was really good, and lacked the typical pronunciation mistake of Hungarians, which is placing stress on the wrong syllable.

So I disagree with you, that writing pronunciation is inefficient in any case. After you learn IPA, it's totally suitable to write the pronunciation of most languages of the world unambiguously. The scope of the transscription would still matter of course, a strict transscription denoting every little detail about pronunciation (in IPA) is usually enclosed between [[.....]], a broad phonetic transscription between [...], an even less strict, phonemic transscription between /.../, and there are many other cases you can specify. And when the scope is smaller, if you only need symbols for the sounds of one language and not all, you don't even need to transscribe it with IPA anymore, you can use the unambiguous symbols of IPA to define new transscribing systems. Or, you can use the original letters of the alphabet of the given language and say something like [å] should denote the vowel that is pronounced in the Norwegian Bokmål words ⟨på,nok,kom,godt⟩... if there are a lot of dialects, and every of them pronounces them differently, you can specify Urban East Norwegian, or typical pronunciation around Oslo. You just have to make unambiguous definitions, taking your expected audience into account, so that they have a basic command of Norwegian. If they happen to be Italians who just have started learning the language, I would say [å] is the vowel in the Standard Italian word ⟨non⟩.

I agree with you, that most people refer to pronunciations in a very ad hoc way, sometimes using English spelling as a reference, which is a very bad choice, because English spelling is not really phonemic, and English has a lot of dialects with really different pronunciations.

⟨Cecilia Gaathe⟩?[Səsi:liə Gå;tə]
Q: How can it be that the (for me) three different sounds - e in "Ce-", a in "-ia" and e in "-te" are noted with the same "ə"

This is exactly, why I ask for your help. I don't know the pronunciation, I just guessed. In the case of "-ia" it was a clearly incorrect assumption, based on English, because I didn't pay attention, a typo, if you want. In the case of "Ce-" however, my background hypotheses was, that all (most) ⟨e⟩ would be pronounced /ə/ in an unstressed syllable. From what I read since then, it's probably not true, I'm not sure about what are the exact conditions (if there are any), so I need your feedback until I figure it out, like yours, when you said that it's different from the ⟨e⟩ in the end of ⟨Gaathe⟩. So probably, it's pronounced [Sesi:lia Gå;tə]. But I can still only guess, whether the first word has tone 1 on its second syllable and the second word has tone 2 and the sound /å/ in its first syllable.

Sorry, this was too long again, I don't know how to express things shorter.

[Tegze3]

Honestly this is too technical for me to understand. I'm of course willing to record some soundfiles if needed, but I'm not sure if I understand the issue at all.

Thank you for your answer too!

Now I clearly see, my explanation is too complicated, totally my bad. Partially, because I wanted to be exact with my question, and I turned out to sharing too much unimportant information. I had the feeling that it will be confusing when I posted the first post but I was too tired and curious to not give it a try or to try again. And I wanted to have the answer for everything at once.

Please let me try again, step by step.

My problem is that Norwegian (Bokmål) orthography doesn't give all the information about the pronunciation of a given word, mainly the two tones. I also struggle to find pronunciation dictionaries, especially for compound words. I devised a way to note the pronunciations of the words in my dictionary. For example I mark the words with tone 1 by ⟨:⟩ and words with tone 2 by ⟨;⟩. I transcibed a section of a book with this system, and I need your help:
Q: Does every word with ⟨;⟩ have tone 2?
Q: Does every word with ⟨:⟩ have tone 1?
Q: What about the compound words?

The text:
##########################################################

Ceci:lia Gaa;the bo:r på Pe;rlen pensjona:t sam:men me:d fa:ren sin, Ala:n W. Gaa;the, som: ei;er ste:deŧ. Mo:ren sin, Iseli:n Gaa;the, druk;net på mys:tisk vi:s i Sku;tebuk:ta fòr;rige som;mer.

Le:o Ba:st ha:r net:topp flyt;tet til: Sku;tebuk:ta. Han: bo:r i den priva:te de:len av pensjona:teŧ sam:men me:d mo:ren sin, Rebek:ka, som: e:r ny:an:satt i stil;lingen som: hotel:lsje:f. Forel:drene han:s e:r skil:t. Fa:ren e:r jourṇalis:t og bo:r i Dubai:.

U;ne Fla;ker bo:r ṣam:men me:d forel:drene og de: to: brø;drene si;ne i et gam;melt skip:perhu:s på øs:tsi;den av Skutebukta. De:r ha:r hun: bod:d bestan:dig. Fa:ren, Wi;dar Fla;ker, e:r fi;sker, men:s mo:ren e:r læ;rer på sko;len in;ne i by:en.

E:gon e:r hun:den til: U;ne. Den he;ter E:gon fordi: den e:r så e;gen og sta:, og sto:rt set:t gjø:r som: den vil:. Deŧ e:r en kne:høy: blan;dingshun:d, me:d bru:n, krøl;lete pel:s, lan:g ha;le og vå:t snu;te. Deŧ si;es at han: stam;mer fra: en politi:hun:d.

Pe;rlen pensjona:t
Pensjona:teŧ Pe;rlen ble: byg;get av Ceci:lias tip:poldefa:r for: o:ver hun;dre å:r si;den. Den gan:gen kom: gjes;tene me:d dam:pbå:t til: dy:pvan:nskai:a, el:ler me:d je:rnba;nen til: by:en og vi;dere der:fra til: kys:ten me:d hes:t og kjer:re. Un:der kri:gen ble: ei;endommen tat:t av tys:kerne, som: lo:t ofise:rene si;ne bo: de:r. Et;terpå: ha:r deŧ vært: fle:re forskjel:lige ei;ere he:lt til: mo:ren og fa:ren til: Cecilia kjøp;te deŧ tilba:;ke, pus;set deŧ op:p og begyn:te å lei;e deŧ u:t til: gjes;ter. Cecilia og fa:ren bo:r i en priva:t de:l i an;dre eta:sje på pensjona:teŧ. Deŧ sam;me gjø:r Leo og mo:ren. Høy:t o:ver res:ten av pensjona:teŧ ra;ger tå:rnvæ;relseŧ.

Thank you if you give me another chance.
And please let me know, which dialect/accent of Norwegian do you speak, so that if your answer is different from other people's, I can see clearer.

[SansEspoir]

Honestly I'm not sure if a native is able to help with your questions, because to us it's kind of obvious how to pronounce a word from spelling alone. You might need more dedicated linguistic help.

I'm from a small place a bit south of Oslo, so I speak a pretty standard eastern norwegian dialect (or what people tend to think of as "bokmål" even though it's not). Of course there's some unique traits or words that make certain posh Oslo-folks go "huh?" but the non-posh people from eastern Oslo have no issues with it.
^{(Or at least, didn't use to. Eastern Oslo these days are more known for socalled Kebabnorsk than the traditional eastern Oslo dialect.)}

[Tegze3]

Honestly I'm not sure if a native is able to help with your questions, because to us it's kind of obvious how to pronounce a word from spelling alone. You might need more dedicated linguistic help.

This is exactly why you, as a native speaker, can help me! Because you know the pronunciations "by heart"! I'm asking you, how would you pronounce the words in the text?
I could find the pronunciation of some words at https://naob.no/, for example, ⟨vinter⟩ is allegedly tone 1, and ⟨sommer⟩ is tone 2. To mark this information, I write them like [vin:ter] and [som;mer]. I only chose this notation ( : vs ; ), because it's easy to type, but if it's more intuitive to you, I can write [vin¹ter] and [som²mer].

But, for example, I can't find the pronounciation of ⟨druknet⟩, so I don't know if it's [druk¹net] or [druk²net]. I can only find the infinitive of this verb, which is tone 2, [druk²ne]. I can only guess that ⟨druknet⟩ also has tone 2: [druk²net]. Is this true?

And I can't find the pronunciations of a lot of other words, like proper names (Cecilia, Une, Gaathe, Dubai...), compound words (politihund, skipperhus...), plurals (gjester, gjestene...), so I ask for your help, for your pronunciation.

Let's run a test with a shorter section of the text. Did I assign the tones to the words correctly (according to your pronunciation)?

Ceci¹lia Gaa²the bo¹r på Pe²rlen pensjona¹t sam¹men me¹d fa¹ren sin, Ala¹n W. Gaa²the, som¹ ei²er ste¹deŧ. Mo¹ren sin, Iseli¹n Gaa²the, druk²net på mys¹tisk vi¹s i Sku²tebuk¹ta fòr²rige som²mer.

Some of them were found in a dictionary, and the rest of them were guessed by me. Please mark where I made a mistake. Use any notation for the two tones ( : vs ; or ¹ vs ² or any other) you prefer.

^{(Or at least, didn't use to. Eastern Oslo these days are more known for socalled Kebabnorsk than the traditional eastern Oslo dialect.)}

Haha, funny

Thank you for your help and time

P.S. And you don't have to restrict yourself to marking tonal differences only. If you use for example "drukna" instead of "druknet", you can mark that too, I am interested in dialectal differences.

[SansEspoir]

Uh... again, above my comprehension level, tbh. If you want I can record a file, and some differences between a few dialects. But as @Olav said above, using the audiobook alongside your reading might be very helpful to you.

[Tegze3]

Okay, no worries then. Can you record yourself reading the following section in your dialect, in a slow, cozy pace, as if you were reading it for a child, so that I can clearly understand the words and learn from it? And then maybe another one with natural speed, just for comparison?

Cecilia Gaathe bor på Perlen pensjonat sammen med faren sin, Alan W. Gaathe, som eier stedet. Moren sin, Iselin Gaathe, druknet på mystisk vis i Skutebukta forrige sommer.

Are the words "druknet", "Perlen" and "Gaathe" pronounced with tone 2?
Are the words "Cecilia", "faren", "Alan", "moren" and "Iselin" pronounced with tone 1? If you cannot decide observing you own pronunciation, you can send an audio recording of these individual words too.
Does your dialect prefer "druknet" or "drukna", "moren sin" or "mora si" or something else?

Thank you,
Tegze

[SansEspoir]

Yes, here you go. I'm sorry about the mic quality, I have an old cheap phone that might need replacing soon, if finances allow.

[Olav]

"Moren sin" is wrong. There's no dialect where that's right. It's either "moren hennes", "mora hennes", "mor hennes" or just "moren". "Hennes mor" is also right.

[Vlot Vlaams]

"Moren sin" is wrong. There's no dialect where that's right. It's either "moren hennes", "mora hennes", "mor hennes" or just "moren". "Hennes mor" is also right.

??? what is wrong? you seem to say "sin" is wrong, and should be "hennes".

But, it depends, no? ... if Norvegian is (at least) a bit like Swedish (and it is), it should distinguish between the "own" mother (sin) and "someone elses" mother (hennes), unlike English where both are "his" or Dutch "zijn/haar"

In that sentence:
“Cecilia Gaathe bor … sammen med faren sin, Alan W. Gaathe … Moren sin, Iselin Gaathe, druknet …”
Because “sin” refers back to the subject (here Cecilia), it means:
Alan W. Gaathe is Cecilia’s father.
Iselin Gaathe is Cecilia’s mother.
So Iselin is the mother of Cecilia (and likewise Alan is her father).

So we would expect "moren sin", in analogy to "faren sin", both parents of Cecilia.

But, pardon me, if this is not about pronunciation.

[Tegze3]

First, thank you for the recording, it's really great. I think I can hear clearly most of the things I was curious of. What you said about the second sentence made me think and I actually checked the original sentence in the book, and it turned out that I made a small mistake while copying:

Moren sin, Iselin Gaathe, druknet på mystisk vis i Skutebukta forrige sommer.

Lesson learned: Never underestimate the intuition of a native speaker.

Probably that 'sin' is ungrammatical there, most likely because it's reflexive, and 'Cecilia Gaathe' is not mentioned in the same sentence before it. I guess

Moren hennes Iselin Gaathe druknet på mystisk vis i Skutebukta forrige sommer.

would sound better. But the original is without 'sin' or 'hennes'.

(The comments of @Vlot Vlaams and @Olav are also supporting this.)

In the recording, you mention that you don't know what "type 1 and 2" (I originally wrote "tone 1 and 2") refer to, which made me think: Is it possible that you haven't heard about tones in the Norwegian language? You know, the difference in melody which helps you tell apart the words "jernet" ('the iron', tone 1) and "gjerne" ('gladly', tone 2) when pronounced. I'm pretty sure your dialect has them, I hear clearly it in your recording (I'm very grateful for it, again).

Since then, I've found this site explaining the distribution of Norwegian tones and consistently using pretty detailed IPA transcription for words besides clear pronunciation, answering quite a big part of my questions. (But I'm still clueless about compound words.) It also surprized me in some aspects, for example, that strong verbs have tone 1 in present tense (e.g. 'Jeg skri¹ver en bok.' but 'Jeg er skri²ver.'). But allegedly some weak verbs also, without any reason, so I will probably still need yous' help in this regard.

(P.S.: Maybe pitch accent is a more suitable name than 'tone' for the "difference in melody" of otherwise identical Norwegian words.)

[SansEspoir]

"Moren sin" is wrong. There's no dialect where that's right. It's either "moren hennes", "mora hennes", "mor hennes" or just "moren". "Hennes mor" is also right.

Technically, you can use "moren sin", but not in this sentence.

??? what is wrong? you seem to say "sin" is wrong, and should be "hennes".

But, it depends, no? ... if Norvegian is (at least) a bit like Swedish (and it is), it should distinguish between the "own" mother (sin) and "someone elses" mother (hennes), unlike English where both are "his" or Dutch "zijn/haar"

In that sentence:
“Cecilia Gaathe bor … sammen med faren sin, Alan W. Gaathe … Moren sin, Iselin Gaathe, druknet …”
Because “sin” refers back to the subject (here Cecilia), it means:
Alan W. Gaathe is Cecilia’s father.
Iselin Gaathe is Cecilia’s mother.
So Iselin is the mother of Cecilia (and likewise Alan is her father).

So we would expect "moren sin", in analogy to "faren sin", both parents of Cecilia.

But, pardon me, if this is not about pronunciation.

Assuming Norwegian is similar enough to Swedish often leads to grammatical mistakes. Swedish is more close to German, and Norwegian is more close to English (so, a lot simpler IMO).
But in that sentence, it is just off. I can't really put my finger on why, because I don't remember shit about adjectives and all that stuff from school, but it's just... "Nope, the editor who let that through needs to be fired. And pay damages to all the readers for having to stumble through that".
But as it turns out, it wasn't the actual sentence after all.

First, thank you for the recording, it's really great. I think I can hear clearly most of the things I was curious of. What you said about the second sentence made me think and I actually checked the original sentence in the book, and it turned out that I made a small mistake while copying:

Moren sin, Iselin Gaathe, druknet på mystisk vis i Skutebukta forrige sommer.

Lesson learned: Never underestimate the intuition of a native speaker.

Probably that 'sin' is ungrammatical there, most likely because it's reflexive, and 'Cecilia Gaathe' is not mentioned in the same sentence before it. I guess

Moren hennes Iselin Gaathe druknet på mystisk vis i Skutebukta forrige sommer.

would sound better. But the original is without 'sin' or 'hennes'.

(The comments of @Vlot Vlaams and @Olav are also supporting this.)

In the recording, you mention that you don't know what "type 1 and 2" (I originally wrote "tone 1 and 2") refer to, which made me think: Is it possible that you haven't heard about tones in the Norwegian language? You know, the difference in melody which helps you tell apart the words "jernet" ('the iron', tone 1) and "gjerne" ('gladly', tone 2) when pronounced. I'm pretty sure your dialect has them, I hear clearly it in your recording (I'm very grateful for it, again).

Since then, I've found this site explaining the distribution of Norwegian tones and consistently using pretty detailed IPA transcription for words besides clear pronunciation, answering quite a big part of my questions. (But I'm still clueless about compound words.) It also surprized me in some aspects, for example, that strong verbs have tone 1 in present tense (e.g. 'Jeg skri¹ver en bok.' but 'Jeg er skri²ver.'). But allegedly some weak verbs also, without any reason, so I will probably still need yous' help in this regard.

(P.S.: Maybe pitch accent is a more suitable name than 'tone' for the "difference in melody" of otherwise identical Norwegian words.)

Well, I know about pitch accent, of course. But still... when foreigners describe how something sounds to their ears, it's very difficul to grasp the concept. To illustrate:
A friend sent me a meme the other day, some dude named "Amin Yashed" who shares a screenshot of person number 3812 that day who tells him they looked and can't find him there.
Took me 3 hours of confusion to understand it, until she logged back on and told me that to her american ears the name sounds like "I'm in your shed". Completely oblivious to me because "Amin/I'm in" and "Yashed/Your shed" is so far away from how my brain would naturally read it. She didn't undersand my confusion, until I sent her a voice message and only then it occured to her that not everyone would read the name that way and thus find it funny.

[Tegze3]

Well, I know about pitch accent, of course. But still... when foreigners describe how something sounds to their ears, it's very difficul to grasp the concept.

Yeah, I know how hard it is to ask native speakers for help, because they usually don't apply the grammar and pronunciation rules of a language consciously, "only" intuitively. So most of the time, they can tell you which sentence is correct or not without doubt or error, even offer a better alternative, but can't tell you why exactly. This intuitive usage is the desired goal of the language learner as well, but until then, learning and applying rules reduces the time needed for getting to a basic level (at least for me). (This is the other side of the same coin.)
Anyway, can you (and would you like to) sort the words according to which kind of pitch accent they have in this short text you've just read?:

Cecilia Gaathe bor på Perlen pensjonat sammen med faren sin, Alan W. Gaathe, som eier stedet. Moren Iselin Gaathe druknet på mystisk vis i Skutebukta forrige sommer.

I want to know if I heard them correctly. After listening to the words one by one and the text multiple times, I think

• "Gaathe, Perlen, faren, moren, druknet, forrige, sommer, Skutebukta" have a similar melody to "gjerne" or "bønner", which is usually called tone/pitch accent 2;
• and "sammen, eier, stedet, mystisk, Cecilia, Iselin, pensjonat, vis, bor, som, sin, med, på" have a similar melody to "jernet" or "bønder", which is usually called tone/pitch accent 1;
• but I'm not really sure about "eier" and "stedet", becaus that part was a bit fast, and not sure at all about "Alan" - it sounded more like an English word to me - like something along "[Ællen]"...?
  So altogether, denoting pitch accent by numbers

  Ceci¹lia Gaa²the bo¹r på¹ Pe²rlen pensjona¹t sam¹men me¹d fa²ren sin¹, Al?an W. Gaa²the, som¹ ei¹?er ste¹?det. Mo²ren Iseli¹n Gaa²the druk²net på¹ mys¹tisk vi¹s i¹ Sku²tebukta for²rige som²mer.

  So, is this correct? What's the opinion of other native speakers, like @Olav ?

[Vlot Vlaams]

Sorry to come back on what I said earlier (and not about pronunciation itself)
Like Olav said, it's to be "Moren hennes" in the second sentence.

Grammar says: Use the reflexive possessive pronoun "sin" when it refers to the subject of the same sentence.
Else use the non-reflexive possessive pronouns hans/hennes.

So I was wrong. It was initially based on my "Dutch" feeling, or like explained further below here, "we" have lost the distiction.
It's his/her (zijn/haar) in all circimstances.

---

On the other hand, I was right ( ) in assuming that Norvegian like Swedish, are two of probably just a few languages which use different possessive pronouns in reflexive and non-reflexive references.

Globally, this explicit reflexive possessive system is relatively rare.
Like
Slavic languages (e.g., Czech svůj, Polish swój)
Baltic languages (Lithuanian, Latvian)
Some Finno-Ugric languages (e.g., Hungarian maga, saját in some contexts)
Icelandic also has sinn / sitt / sín

But in Germanic, the Scandinavian languages stand out because English, German, and Dutch have lost or drastically reduced - read lost/dropped - this distinction.

[SansEspoir]

Yeah, I know how hard it is to ask native speakers for help, because they usually don't apply the grammar and pronunciation rules of a language consciously, "only" intuitively. So most of the time, they can tell you which sentence is correct or not without doubt or error, even offer a better alternative, but can't tell you why exactly. This intuitive usage is the desired goal of the language learner as well, but until then, learning and applying rules reduces the time needed for getting to a basic level (at least for me). (This is the other side of the same coin.)

Exactly. This is kind of why I'm against all these people just travelling around the world thinking "I can make a living as an english teacher" or something. Or the apps (like Tandem) where they only show you natives.
I went to a school where native brits was our english teachers. And I have to say it was horrible. Partly their norwegian was very bad for someone who were supposed to teach anything at all, and partly we ended up having questions they weren't able to explain in a way that made sense to us. They also defaulted more to english, thinking we were able to understand explanations in english because it was an english class. If I hadn't ended up a dropout due to healh, I'm not sure I'd be good at english today, because I did not do well with them as my teachers.

Anyway, can you (and would you like to) sort the words according to which kind of pitch accent they have in this short text you've just read?:

Cecilia Gaathe bor på Perlen pensjonat sammen med faren sin, Alan W. Gaathe, som eier stedet. Moren Iselin Gaathe druknet på mystisk vis i Skutebukta forrige sommer.

I want to know if I heard them correctly. After listening to the words one by one and the text multiple times, I think

• "Gaathe, Perlen, faren, moren, druknet, forrige, sommer, Skutebukta" have a similar melody to "gjerne" or "bønner", which is usually called tone/pitch accent 2;
• and "sammen, eier, stedet, mystisk, Cecilia, Iselin, pensjonat, vis, bor, som, sin, med, på" have a similar melody to "jernet" or "bønder", which is usually called tone/pitch accent 1;
• but I'm not really sure about "eier" and "stedet", becaus that part was a bit fast, and not sure at all about "Alan" - it sounded more like an English word to me - like something along "[Ællen]"...?
  So altogether, denoting pitch accent by numbers

  Ceci¹lia Gaa²the bo¹r på¹ Pe²rlen pensjona¹t sam¹men me¹d fa²ren sin¹, Al?an W. Gaa²the, som¹ ei¹?er ste¹?det. Mo²ren Iseli¹n Gaa²the druk²net på¹ mys¹tisk vi¹s i¹ Sku²tebukta for²rige som²mer.

  So, is this correct? What's the opinion of other native speakers, like @Olav ?

First: Yes, Alan is used with english pronounciation, as it's not a common norwegian name. If it had been spelled with 2 Ls, I might have used a more norwegian-sounding pronounciation (like the swedish Allan), but I read the text as it was written, with 1 L, making my brain assume the name was english.

As for the words themselves, yes I this your grouping is correct. The words with the pressure on the first part of the word (which is the most common in Eastern Norwegian, IMO) seems to fit with Pitch Accent 2.
But again, nothing I really think about, so not easy to wrap my head around.