Its certainly a good idea to keep clear of Boar’s Hill. 
Ordet – “word” is ord. -et is the post-positive definite article for neuter nouns (just as -en is the post-positive definite article for non-neuter nouns, e.g., begynnelse/begynnelsen. The indefinite article is placed before the noun: et ord, “a word.”
I begynnelsen var Ordet. Ordet var hos Gud, og Ordet var Gud. Han var i begynnelsen hos Gud.
This is Bokmål but could almost be Danish (it would be begyndelsen instead of begynnelsen, but the d isn’t pronounced; and it would be det, with silent t, instead of han), except that Norwegian is pronounced the way it’s spelled, but Danish isn’t pronounced anything at all like the way it’s spelled–in fact, it isn’t pronounced at all, it’s mumbled with lots of glottal catches everywhere. Danish is the laughingstock of Scandinavia. According to Victor Borge, Danish is not a language, but a disease of the throat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_iixmqSBQw
I can read (but not speak or understand) a little Danish, and I can generally read aftenposten.no with some effort, which is written in a conservative, Danish-Norwegian known as Riksmål that isn’t, however, very much different from Bokmål.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riksmål
It helps to know German, and to be able to undo the second sound-shift, since all the Scandinavian languages (leaving Finnish aside) have absorbed much Low German vocabulary directly and through loan-translations. Ex.: “understand” = forstå (Danish and Norwegian), loan translation from verstehen. slot = High German Schloß. This is a result of the fact that during the late medieval/early modern period the Hanseatic League was the dominant power in the Baltic. Denmark-Norway (then a united kingdom under the Danish Crown) and Sweden, and the coastal part of Finland, too (which was basically Swedish) were essentially Hanseatic colonies.
Verbs: No ending on the infinitive; just one present tense form for all persons: just add -r to the infinitive. For passive, just add -s. But Norwegian and Danish have strong verbs, like English.
-else is a very common noun suffix, like -tion in English, derived from verbs.
By the way, my understanding is that Nynorsk, as well as Bokmål and Riksmål, are written languages, not spoken languages. In the mainly rural areas where Nynorsk is the prevailing written norm, as well as elsewhere in Norway, people actually speak various local dialects, although if I’m not mistaken, spoken Bokmål is a standard lingua franca, at least in the cities, including eastern Norway. My understanding is that Nynorsk is almost exclusively rural, but I could be wrong. The linguistic situation in Norway is very complicated.
Substitution drill using previously acquired vocabulary:
I begynnelsen var tannbørsten.
The han surprised me too a bit, since if this were Swedish, I would have sort of expected det as well. But I think the Norwegian translator might have used det just as well, it’s only that he/she wanted to use the animate third person pronoun han (“he”) instead of the inanimate det (“it”). It’s han not det because the translator interprets the Greek that way.
“The word was with God, and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God.”
There’s a slight possibility that I’m wrong about this of course.
Or perhaps detta (“this one”) rather than det (“it”).
EDIT: Swedish detta is dette in Norwegian.
I’d better not into the finesses of the pronoun system in skandinaviska (the dialect continuum of North Germanic languages spoken in Danmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland, seen as a whole), since it’s very likely that I’ll mix up things badly.
NWT > (> Bokmål> ):
I begynnelsen var Ordet, og Ordet var hos Gud, og Ordet var en gud. Denne var i begynnelsen hos Gud.
Notice the “en gud.” You can ask Isaac Newton about it.
Bibelen 2001 > (> Bokmål> ):
I begynnelsen var Ordet.
Ordet var hos Gud,
og Ordet var Gud.Han var i begynnelsen hos Gud.
Bibelen 1930 > (> Bokmål> )I begynnelsen var Ordet, og Ordet var hos Gud, og Ordet var Gud. Han var i begynnelsen hos Gud.
Bibelen 2011 > (> Nynorsk> ):I opphavet var Ordet,
Ordet var hos Gud,
og Ordet var Gud.Han var i opphavet hos Gud.
Bibelen 1938 > (> Nynorsk> ):I upphavet var Ordet, og Ordet var hjå Gud, og Ordet var Gud. Han var i upphavet hjå Gud.
Svenska 1917> :I begynnelsen var Ordet, och Ordet var hos Gud, och Ordet var Gud. Detta var i begynnelsen hos Gud.
Thanks, Joel. This is how I analyze the different choices of pronouns (I’m assuming, rightly or not, that the usage of the pronouns is not very different from one variant of skandinaviska to the other):
Han: Animate pronoun “he”. The translator emphasizes that the Word is a personal entity. I think this a case of constructio ad sensum, and we should probably ask Isaac Newton about this as well. 
detta/dette (Swedish/Norwegian): demonstrative neuter pronoun “this one”, neuter because the word it refers to, Ordet, is neuter as well.
denna/denne: same demostrative pronoun “this one”, but now non-neuter. (In skandinaviska, feminine and masculine have merged.) It is not neuter, because in the translation that uses it, it (questionably?) refers not to Ordet but to en gud, which (as the non-neuter article en shows) is non-neuter.
I have been looking at aftenposten.no ever since Hylander mentioned it. They have some audio of some of their articles on Soundcloud, read clearly and precisely: https://soundcloud.com/aftenposten-opplest
Also, I had my first conversation lesson today, with a native Norwegian who teaches Norwegian over Skype. I started out (all in Norwegian) by introducing myself, telling her my name and how long I had been studying Norwegian (Jeg begynte forrige uke). Then I said I had a story, and asked if I could tell it (Jeg har en historie. Skal jeg fortelle det?) And then I told my memorized story from Mark about Jesus and the Simon and Andrew. It worked well because she wasn’t actually familiar with it.
Then we talked about my plans for learning Norwegian, using a fair amount of English. I found that I couldn’t understand as much as I would have liked of what she said aloud, but when she would write things down, it was far easier for me.
Next I hope to find some Norwegian conversational dialogues and practice improvising on them with her.
You can also view some of the videos on aftenposten.no (“The Evening Post”), which have narration and subtitles in Norwegian for the hearing impaired. Here’s one about a man whose best friend (bestevenn) is a walrus (hvalross) (or maybe the other way around). Skip the commercial.
http://www.aftenposten.no/webtv/#!/video/111710/han-elsker-aa-kose-og-vil-bli-kloedd-paa-magen
Vi trodde han skulle dø, men han våknet til og ble livsglad igjen.
“We thought he was going to die, but he woke up and became glad to be alive again.”
han-elsker-aa-kose-og-vil-bli-kloedd-paa-magen
“he loves to snuggle and wants to be scratched (?) on his belly.”
For to år siden fant Audun Rikardsen, professor i biologi, et unikt vennskap i hvalrossen «Kompis.» De tilbragte mye tid sammen over en periode på 1 1/2 måned før den forsvant. Les hele historien i A-magasinet i helgen.
“Two years ago Audun Rikarsen, a biology professor, found a unique friendship in the walrus “Kompis” (“buddy”). They spent much time together over a period of 1 1/2 months before he disappeared. Read the whole story in the A-Magazine today.”
I got everything but kose, kloedd and Kompis from knowing a little Danish.
Although it’s apparently not a Norwegian word (at least Google Translate doesn’t recognize it), ross is an old Germanic word for “horse” that is preserved in German with an archaic connotation, like “steed.” So my wild guess is that hval-ross is etymologically probably “whale-steed.” Another word to add to your Norwegian vocabulary–one that will be as useful as tannbørste on your trip.
Les hele historien i A-magasinet i helgen.
I think i helgen actually means “this weekend” (as Google translate proposes) or perhaps “this Sunday”. Helg must be the same word as English “holy”, compare “holiday”. In Finnish, the same expression “holy (day)” often means just “free day”, “day off work”; the expression has surely been borrowed from Swedish.
I was wrong about feminine and masculine having merged in all variants of skandinaviska: apparently in most (but not all) dialects of Norwegian the distinction still persists. So take whatever I say about Norwegian with a grain of salt, as I assume that everything is about the same as in Swedish…
In Finnish we have an expression “to speak Norwegian”. It means “to vomit”, typically after heavy drinking. If Danish sounds like a disease of the throat to Norwegians, Norwegian doesn’t sound much different to Finnish ears…
Urbaani sanakirja (the Urban Dictionary):
Puhua norjaa (“speak Norwegian”): Oksentaa (“to vomit”). Käyn hieman puhumassa norjaa ja palaan sitten tanssilattialle. (“I’m off for a while to speak a little Norwegian and then I’m back to the dance floor.”)
(English translations mine)
Yes, you’re right. I helgen = “this weekend”. I dag or something like that would be “today.”
Norwegian gender (from Wikipedia):
As in most Indo-European languages (English being one of a few exceptions), nouns are classified by gender, which has consequences for the declension of agreeing adjectives and determiners. Norwegian has three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter—except the Bergen dialect, which has only two genders: common and neuter. Riksmål and conservative Bokmål traditionally have two genders like Danish, but more modern languages have three genders, especially in their spoken form.
As of June 5, 2005, all feminine nouns could once again be written as masculine nouns in Bokmål, giving the option of writing the language with only two genders – common and neuter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_language#Nouns
Norwegian is a legislated language.
This thread is much more fun than ancient Greek!
Hross is Icelandic for horse. Apparently the Old Norse for walrus was hrosshvalr. That description of a walrus would make a bit more sense to my English-trained ears “horse-whale, a type of whale this is like a horse” rather than “whale-horse, a type of horse that is like a whale.” But I have no idea which languages that noun ordering principle carries over into.
Puhua norjaa (“speak Norwegian”): Oksentaa (“to vomit”). Käyn hieman puhumassa norjaa ja palaan sitten tanssilattialle. (“I’m off for a while to speak a little Norwegian and then I’m back to the dance floor.”)
We need to set up a Scandinavian/Nordic forum for stuff like this!
Ross is the kind of word Wagner used in his pseudo-Ur-Deutsch (I just finished sitting through 17 hours of the Ring.) Mein lieber Ross Grane.
I thought Ross was a perfectly ordinary German word. But my knowledge of German comes through opera and Lieder. Certainly Wagner uses Ross very often, as in Brünnhilde’s apostrophe to her horse in Götterdämmerung.
Grane, mein Ross!
Sei mir gegrüsst!
My excuses to Joel for highjacking his thread once again, but Hylander’s “legislated language” brought to my mind the debate around the new Swedish gender-neutral third person pronoun hen to replace/complement the gender-specific pronouns han and hon. Advocated mainly by feminist and LGBT people, it is supposed to make this world a better place to live in (in ways that remain mysterious to me, my native Finnish having only gender-neutral pronouns). Although it is little used in the actual speech community, it has gained some official acceptance. I think similar propositions have been made for Norwegian as well. Whatever you think about the ideological backgrounds, the fact remains the this is an interesting linguistic experiment… There are preschools (well, at least one) in Sweden that have actually adopted this reform and use it consistently. Just for the record, the pronoun is no less artificial than would be arbitrarily deciding that from now on the new English pronoun “ze” (accusative “hem”, genitive “hes”…) is used of either sex instead of he/she…
Given Sweden’s sub-replacement native-TFR*, the size of its population of foreign descent**, and their political commitment to increasing that number***, it’s hard to imagine the people legislating about pronouns today having much say about any future for the Swedish language.
- 1.8 native (versus 2.2 foreign, higher if you don’t count the 150,000 Finns)
** 20% foreign-born and children of two foreign-born parents
*** 30% by 2030, according to Statistics Sweden
On gender neutrality, PC practice in English is still in flux, after many decades. “s/he” had some currency but is now moribund, and was no help in getting beyond “him or her”—or “her or him”. Some academic writing, more often in the US than in Britain, alternates between the male and female forms, using “he” is one sentence and “she” in the next, which gives a schizophrenic sort of impression. Most, more sensibly in my view, stick to one or the other, with some feminist preference for the female. The plural forms, gender-neutral, are becoming more normal as a deliberate way of avoiding the masculine default (“If anyone asks, tell them …”), and will sometimes be editorially imposed. That’s not an option open to most European languages. Issues of gender bias and sexism have largely moved beyond such linguistic epiphenomena on to less obvious and more deeply embedded cultural praxis.
Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc, mwh. The other week, my wife’s place of work began including their preferred gender pronouns at the bottom of their email footers. From their explanation page:
What are some commonly used pronouns?
She/her/hers
He/him/his
They/them/theirs
Ze/hir/hirs
Just my name, please!
Does ze actually exist? Honestly, I was just jesting and thought it was funny! I really thought I just invented ze…
“If anyone asks, tell them …” doesn’t seem as unnatural as other possibilities. I’ve heard of the practice of alternating between he and she, but I’ve never actually seen it in the wild, which probably shows how viable such practice is.
But frankly, I wonder if this is leading anywhere. In French for example the gender system (like in Greek) is too deeply embedded in the language for this sort of game to work. The default gender is masculine, except that if you decide to use the word personne for “someone”, “anyone”, “everyone” etc., all adjectives and pronouns referring to it need to be in the feminine. Foreigners learning the languages might make all sorts of inferences about this, but no average French person would ever stop to think about it.
When I hear the word gynecologist, at least in a Finnish context, I make the unconscious assumption, until proven otherwise, that we are talking about a woman; but if the context is historical (say, over 50 years ago), I equally unconsciously assume we talking about a man. The meanings and inferences we make about words change according to the reality around us. But can we change reality by changing words?
Does ze actually exist? Honestly, I was just jesting and thought it was funny!
Yes, somewhere I’ve read about this strange animal, but I’ve never observed one in the wild.
I use singular "they/them/their when appropriate, which has a long and honorable history in English, despite what self-appointed experts say. I don’t do this out of political correctness–just to flout the English language legislators.
But can we change reality by changing words?
As words are the only means by which we can talk about and frame reality I would have thought the answer is unequivocally yes.