Olav Jakobsen Høyem (1830–1899) was a Norwegian teacher, telegrapher, supervisor of banknote printing and linguist. He was born in

Byneset Byneset is a headland located in Trondheim Municipality in Trøndelag county, Norway. The area is located just west of the city of Trondheim. The Trondheimsfjorden lies to the north, Orkdalsfjorden lies to the west, and the Gaulosen bay lies t ...

outside

Trondheim Trondheim ( , , ; ), historically Kaupangen, Nidaros, and Trondhjem (), is a city and municipality in Trøndelag county, Norway. As of 2022, it had a population of 212,660. Trondheim is the third most populous municipality in Norway, and is ...

in Søndre Trondhjem county. His father was Jakob Høyem and his mother Karen Olsdatter Prestegaard Høyem. As a linguist, he fought for a

Nynorsk Nynorsk (; ) is one of the two official written standards of the Norwegian language, the other being Bokmål. From 12 May 1885, it became the state-sanctioned version of Ivar Aasen's standard Norwegian language (''Landsmål''), parallel to the Da ...

written normal which was more consistent with

Trøndersk __NOTOC__ Trøndersk (), also known as ''trøndermål'' () or ''trøndsk'' (), is a Norwegian dialect, or rather a group of several sub-dialects. As is the case with all Norwegian dialects, it has no standardised orthography, and its users writ ...

than

Ivar Aasen Ivar Andreas Aasen (; 5 August 1813 – 23 September 1896) was a Norwegian philologist, lexicographer, playwright, and poet. He is best known for having assembled one of the two official written versions of the Norwegian language, Nynorsk, from ...

's version was. One notable thing is that he etymologically employed the

Old Norse Old Norse, also referred to as Old Nordic or Old Scandinavian, was a stage of development of North Germanic languages, North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants ...

character '' ð'' as a silent letter in e.g. ''með'' ,

preposition Adpositions are a part of speech, class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in, under, towards, behind, ago'', etc.) or mark various thematic relations, semantic roles (''of, for''). The most common adpositions are prepositi ...

'with', from Old Norse ''með'', which was spelled ''med'' in Ivar Aasen's normal. He also preferred to use ''a'' endings where Ivar Aasen's normal has ''i'', e.g. ''sola''

noun In grammar, a noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, like living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. A noun may serve as an Object (grammar), object or Subject (grammar), subject within a p ...

'the sun' instead of ''soli''.

External links

''O. J. Høyems gate'', article in Adresseavisen 21 July 2004

Portrait
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hoyem, Olav Jakobsen 1830 births 1899 deaths Linguists from Norway People from Trøndelag