Remember the pink and glossy sentence from lesson 4?
Jeg elsker
deg!
We're now gonna have a look a the word "deg" and its relatives. As we
said at that point, "deg" is the object form of "du".
Very simplified, we can
say that the object (direct or indirect) is a word, or group of words, that represent the entity acted
upon or affected by the verb action. From the sentence "I love you", it
might seem like there is no difference between the subject and object forms
in English, but that is not the case. The following table show the
subject and objects forms in English:
Subject |
Object |
I
you
he
she
it
we
you
they |
me
you
him
her
it
us
you
them |
Thus, the "you" in "I love you" is just one of a few exceptions in
English. The other pronouns do change when they function as an object.
If you speak English well, it's very easy to know when to use the
object forms in Norwegian: in exactly the same cases! However, in the cases of
"you" and "it", which don't change in English, you must try it out with
a different pronoun. For example, if you want to say "I love you"
in Norwegian, try switching "you" with "him" or "her", and you'll see that it changes
in English. Hence,
the object form must be used in Norwegian.
You already know the subject forms of the Norwegian pronouns from the
very first lesson. Here are they again, together with their object forms:
|
|
Subject |
Object |
|
I |
jeg |
meg |
you |
du |
deg |
he
she
it |
han
hun
det / den |
ham
henne
det / den |
|
we |
vi |
oss |
you (pl.) |
dere |
dere |
they |
de |
dem |
Does it seem hard having to distinguish subject and object all the time
when speaking?
Don't worry; only the pronouns change according to these functions.
Contrary to many other languages, like German, Japanese or Latin, the
nouns and everything else stay exactly the same. And you don't use
pronouns thaaat often, do you?
|