Language musings

So it has been a quiet year blogwise so far. 

Not really otherwise though. Year two of the pandemic and I am on the cusp of my PhD adventure. I have a fair amount to do in that respect, but why rush?

Of course the biggest adventure of all so far this year is Leozinho. Now six months and a while to go until he is fully grown, but definitely in the pleasant part of the experience. (The first few months were harder than I anticipated). 

But the actual topic for this post is to mull over a segment I heard on a podcast I have recently discovered. It is a Norwegian and called Språksnakk, not to be confused with Språktalk (another podcast I have been listening to for longer). 

Anyway, in yesterday's show a listener had sent in a question around the Norwegian phrase "ærlig innrømme". The key point was that innrømme is to admit something, and so the association is quite counterintuitive: how does one admit anything other than honestly? A tautology of sorts. 

What I found disappointing about the response was that there was no reference to English. Rather the expert spoke of the emergence of the phrase "ærlig talt". Now I am no linguist, to be sure. but as someone fluent in both English and Norwegian, it seemed to me that it is in fact a Anglicization.  Ærlig talt is not a tautology in the same way in Norwegian as ærlig innrømme. 

But if one considers that the word "honestly" in English can be a synonym colloquially for sincerely (as confirmed by my screenshot from thesaurus.com, then it could be argued that the point is not about honesty as much as sincerity. 

My take, for what it is worth.