Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Stamp of the Day: "Piggsvin"

There IS always something fun going on with Norwegians! Look, this poor little hedgehog is misidentified as a 'piggsvin', which means porcupine in English, and literally 'spiny pig' in Swedish. The Swedish word for hedgehog is 'igelkott', which comes from German and means sort of "cone with lots of nails on it". So, if the Norwegians calls hedgehogs piggsvin, what do they call the porcupines?

Note also, the stamp says NOREG, which is not a misspelling, only the spelling of Norway (Norge) in nynorsk, a different variant of Norwegian.

3 comments:

O.K. said...

Haha, now I want to see some norwegian stamps titled "Tallefjant", "Kjempetorsk" and "Vaskenalle" too.

EH said...

Piggsvin is also called pinnsvin in nynorsk...

AnS said...

Annu en rolig norgehistoria