"I have important visitors."
Translation:Jeg har viktig besøk.
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so how do you know the meaning is plural if both words (viktig,besøk) refer to singular objects?
The same reason 'group' is a singular word in English, yet it doesn't describe a single person :)
I'm also wondering whether this always (or most commonly) means "visitors" in the plural, or can it also mean "visitor" in the singular?
I said "Jeg har viktige besøkende" and it okayed it. Does that make sense as well? Or is it just best to say "Jeg har viktig besøk"?
I've read through this thread and there's still one thing that hasn't been addressed definitively.
Would it be possible for this sentence to also mean I have an important visitor?
Does "besøk" always refer to more than one person? Someone below equated it with the function of the word "group" in English, which in this case would suggest it always translates to "visitors".
Another suggested substituting 'gjester' as an equivalent - again, that means that "besøk" means more than one person.
But then someone else wrote that 'besøk' can be plural (but they didn't write that it must be plural), which suggests that it can also refer to one visitor. That left me confused...
So, can it ever mean: I have an important visitor ?
If it can, is it the case that it is still most commonly understood to be plural?
Takk!
"Besøk" is like the english "company". "I have company" can mean a few different things but without further context I can't pin point what. Is it one guest, two, or ten? Is it the company of onesself? In any case there are a currently unknowable number of people visiting.
Because that's not a word in Norwegian.
You'd use either "besøk" (which is the word for "(a) visit" and by extension the people/person visiting), or "gjester".
Searching in Google for besøkere actually produces some results in Norwegian. The word is also included in the Swedish Wiktionary (but not in the Norwegian one):
https://sv.wiktionary.org/wiki/besøkere
However, it is indeed not included in Bokmålsordboka. Does it mean that this word is sometimes used in Norwegian but is not officially accepted?
Could be the same kind of results as searching for misspelled or slightly altered English words. It's common to find many Google results for those but it doesn't make the words standard English. In some cases they might be accepted forms in a dialect, but items that are not a word in any English dialect will often still get plenty of search results just due to erroneous writers out there.
If you go to Bokmålsordboka website and look up besøk you will definitely see besøkene as one of the two possibilities for the flertall bestemt form. It may not be used though...
Is "besoker" not used as a plural for "visitors" because it's a verb or is there some other rule or idiosyncrasy at work here?
Besøk is a neuter noun with no suffix for its plural indefinite form -- which usually applies to single-syllable neuter nouns, but also applies to some multisyllabic ones, too. (I realize this is 7 months later, but this answer could be useful to others.)
It did not accept "Jeg er et viktig besøk", but I don't understand why it is wrong.
If that’s exactly what you wrote, it’s got an “er” instead of “har”. It would translate as, “I am an important visitation”.
It's just not a word in Norwegian.
You need to use either "besøk", "gjester" or "besøkende" (in order of preference).
'Gjester' is plural. En gjest, flere gjester. The word 'viktig' has to be plural too which is 'viktige'.
Jeg har en viktig gjest.
Jeg har viktige gjester.