Laurdag

This week I arrived at our new place on Kleiva, or Kleiven. The Danes, you see, have lost their feminine gender nouns and the Norwegians picked up the written habit during those few centuries when it was the Kingdom of Denmark and Norway. So, today bokmål has a choice for the feminine nouns: one can pretend they're masculine. A bit weird, but okay. However, in nynorsk that freedom is retracted and feminine nouns must be treated as feminine. Our street is one of those words that straddles that line. On the bus line the stop is Kleiven, because they favor bokmål more than the Stavanger bus line does. But I've also seen people write it Kleiva on their mailboxes and such. This week we bought a kayak, as you may have seen in my last blog. Giving my address for delivery after we conversed about the sale in English, the seller corrected me several times - when I said Kleiven, he said Kleiva. It seems to be almost a patriotic statement. We live here and this is the name by which we call this place.