This is well outside the scope of the thread but I feel the need to point out a few things. Presenting a list of "
very large changes in the spoken and written Norwegian, both lexical and grammatical" for the last 40 years without any systematic evidence is courageous and I find that some of it is misrepresented.
1. The lost of distinction between "realis" and "irrealis". The two modi "han kunne gjøre det" og "han kunne ha gjort det" are now fused into one "han kunne gjort det".
I would have said that "han kunne gjort det" was an abbreviated form of "han kunne ha gjort det", and means "he could have done it (on a specific occasion)". While "han kunne gjøre det" means "he was able to do it (generally)". Would you agree, and say that now no distinction is now made between those two meanings? Or have I misunderstood something?
There may indeed be a change going on here, or more specifically a realignment in the paradigm as one distinction will be lost anyway. In a more conservative system, realis is distinct from irrealis (b and c) but not distinct from the indicative past tense (a and b). In this system, the realis/irrealis distinction is morphologically coded but not the past/conditional distinction. Realigning the meaning along past/conditional instead, will separate the indicative past tense from the conditionals, but at the cost of collapsing realis/irrealis. In either case, some overlap in meaning is inevitable and ambiguities will have to be resolved in context.
a) Han kunne gjøre det - past tense
b) Han kunne gjøre det - conditional (realis)
c) Han kunne ha gjort det - past conditional (irrealis)
Also, leaving out
ha from the past conditional is perhaps an abbreviation somehow, but they are not equivalent.
d) Han skulle ha lest boka på mandag - allows an interpretation where the reading takes place before Monday.
e) Han skulle lest boka på mandag - does
not allow an interpretation where the reading takes place before Monday.
3. Disapperance of the full fledged conditional clause "dersom jeg hadde gjort det ...", replaced by "hadde jeg gjort det".
I am not sure what "full fledged" is supposed to mean in this context. Conditionals of this type seem to go back to proto-Germanic. It is probably a direct continuation of the old Germanic subjunctive, still morphologically expressed in German (
hätte ich geld, würde ich....) and Icelandic (
hefði ég peninga, myndi ég....) but in the other Germanic languages, the only cue to the conditional meaning is word order itself. The construction is thus not a recent invention and has probably existed in the language before the word
dersom came about. I think you got it wrong though. My gut feeling is that conditionals with the overt conditional marker
hvis is squeezing out the old Germanic one as well as
dersom.
Caveat: I did not have the Icelandic and German sentence fragments verified.
2. Extended use of the past participle instead of the infinitive (I can't find a good example just now, but I'll supply it later).
Sentences like:
f) Jeg skulle likt å sett filmen.
g) Det hadde vært gøy å dratt på ferie.
Some linguists believe that this is a relict of the subjunctive in Old Norse that has survived in irrealis contexts in many dialects so this extended use of the past participle is not random but rather constrained. If that is true, then spreading it would perhaps mean regaining a meaning distinction that once was lost. For some of these dialects, I think there would be a meaning difference between:
h)
Han hadde likt å se på henne - Realis
i)
Han hadde likt å sett på henne - Irrealis
5. The "garpegenitiv" replacing almost entirely the s-genitive.
The s-genitive has had competitors for several centuries and has been losing ground all the time, not only to the "garpegenitiv". If this change has followed the famous s-curve, most of the job was most likely done a long time before 1982. In the last 40 years, we have probably only seen the final breaths of the s-genitive after a decline that started centuries ago.