ingvild

Words have power. I don't mean in a magical, "don't tell people your name or they'll have control over you" kind of way. I mean that words help define how we thing about some things. Words can make you feel better, and they can hurt.

( Wherein I muse about zero tolerance and privilege )

I have no idea why I'm updating so often these days. Most likely it's because those of my friends who're still in Bergen haven't had their final exams yet, so I get a lot of time to just think about nothing.

Reading this at puritybrown's blog got me thinking about the Norwegian word for comics/comic book/graphic novel/thingamajig: Tegneserie (nynorsk teikneserie). The more I thought about it, the more I realised that it's actually a pretty good word.

If I were to make a morphological analysis of this word, two alternative results would come.

1: It's a compound word, consisting of the verb tegne (draw) and serie (series).
A series that has been drawn, or a series of drawings.
This seems to be analogous to the term "sequential art", which in the blog post I linked to was deemed insufficient because it doesn't take into consideration the importance of the words.

This brings us neatly to the second analysis.
2: It's a compound word of the noun tegn (sign, letter) and serie (series) with a so-called fugue between to link them (in this case the letter e. Norwegian uses e and s as fugues. Look at the word barnebarnsbarn).
A series of letters/signs, presumably telling a story.

Combining these two definitions, we get A series of drawings and letters/signs telling a story.

And then we just add another word to indicate format.
Tegneseriestripe= comic strip
Tegneserieroman= graphic novel
Tegneseriealbum= a self-contained story which nonetheless often is part of a series, like the individual issues of Asterix.
Tegneserieblad= one issue of for example X-Men, or a small collection of strips. Sometimes a collection of ongoing stories from different series. This is the vaguest term, and ideally there should be a difference between the two. We're more likely to speak of an issue when one story/chapter of a story fills the entire thing.
Tegneseriebok= A hardcover collection of blader or strips.

Ser ut til at jeg må ta denne her på norsk. *Kremt*

Kjære Carl I. Hagen.

Når du sa at "Islamsk* råd må godta at ytringsfriheten er en fundamentalistisk verdi i Norge"...

Mente du kanskje "fundamental"?

*Rettet fordi hjernen min ikke var til stede.