Norwegian: Mon

W

winenous

Senior Member
England
English - British
"Julie finner en colaboks i minibaren og legger mon på senga mens Maria finner fram den bærbare PCen sin."
The word I stumbled on in this sentence at the top of the the "finner fram" thread was "mon"

I have only come across it before in the phrase "mon tro" (I wonder).

How does it change the meaning or feel in this sentence? Is it a hangover from Danish?
 
    • Mysterious. It would normally be legger den på senga. If one letter was typed wrong, e.g. 'men', you'd expect it to be a typo. But here two letters are wrong - a big typo?

    You're right that 'mon' is normally only used in Norwegian today in 'montro/mon tro'. But it's quite common in Danish with a similar kind of meaning: 'mon han ikke skal gøre det' = I suppose he won't do it/I shouldn't think he'll do it/let's hope he doesn't do it, etc.
     
    serbianfan said:
    Mysterious. It would normally be legger den på senga. If one letter was typed wrong, e.g. 'men', you'd expect it to be a typo. But here two letters are wrong - a big typo?

    You're right that 'mon' is normally only used in Norwegian today in 'montro/mon tro'. But it's quite common in Danish with a similar kind of meaning: 'mon han ikke skal gøre det' = I suppose he won't do it/I shouldn't think he'll do it/let's hope he doesn't do it, etc.
    Click to expand...
    Ah, I misread "legger" as "ligger". Maybe @Jeg heter Anderson would like to comment on the possibility of typos?

    BTW I did notice this entry for "mon" in bokmålsordboka, which describes the Danish usaage you mentioned, but I don't see how that works in the sentence I quoted
    Ordbøkene.no - Bokmålsordboka og Nynorskordboka
     
    Last edited:
    On second thoughts, typos are unlikely because m and o aren't near d and e respectively on a normal keyboard.

    It could of course be a dialect word for 'den', but that would only work if the speaker used other dialect words.

    This is of course about Danish again, but the more I think about it, the more meanings 'mon' seems to have: on the Internet I found 'Hvem i byen har mon ikke set ham', where you could maybe just leave it out of the translation into English.
     
    I found the sentence here as
    "Julie finner en colaboks i minibaren og legger seg på senga mens Maria finner fram den bærbare PCen sin."

    I guess it makes more sense. (Mon ikke det giver mere mening :))
     
    Yes, thanks Piccando, it's from a Norwegian course from NTNU, a Norwegian university. I had a quick look through the lesson and the Norwegian seems ok. Just one very small criticism - I wouldn't put 'at' in the sentences 'Jeg tror at jeg blir ferdig i kveld' and 'Jeg synes at det er kjempebra!'. The exercises seem rather boring - that's not the way I learn languages :)
     
    So the unsolved mystery here is how "seg" became "mon" (you would have to have drunk a rather large quantity of akevitt for it to be a typing error). But I trust the readers of this forum won't lose any sleep over the unsolved mystery :)
     
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