of endings is related to the syllable length of the verb in Old Norse. "Short-syllable" () verbs in Norse kept their endings. The "long-syllable" () verbs lost their (unstressed) endings or had them converted to -e. Dative case The original Germanic contextual difference between the dative and accusative cases, standardized in modern German and Icelandic, has degenerated in spoken Danish and Swedish, a tendency which spread to Bokmål too. Ivar Aasen treated the dative case in detail in his work, Norsk Grammatik (1848), and use of Norwegian dative as a living grammatical case can be found in a few of the earliest Landsmål texts. However, the dative case has never been part of official Landsmål/Nynorsk. It is, however, present in some spoken dialects north of Oslo, Romsdal, and south and northeast of Trondheim. The grammatical phenomenon is highly threatened in the mentioned areas, while most speakers of conservative varieties have been highly influenced by the national standard languages, using only the traditional accusative word form in both cases. Often, though not always, the difference in meaning between the dative and accusative word forms can thus be lost, requiring the speaker to add more words to specify what was actually meant, to avoid potential loss of information. Future tense There are regional variations in the use of future tense, for example, "He is going to travel.": . . . . Syntax Syntax can vary greatly between dialects, and the tense is important for the listener to get the meaning. For instance, a question can be formed without the traditional "asking-words" (how, where, what, who..) For example, the sentence ? (in Bokmål), ? (in Nynorsk), literally: "How much is the clock?" i.e. "What time is it?" can be put in, among others, the following forms: ? (Is the clock much?) (stress is on "the clock") ? (Is it much, the clock?) (stress on "is") ? (literally: "What is the clock?") ? (literally: What the clock is?), or, using another word for clock, ? ? (literally: What is she?). Pronunciation of vowels Diphthongization of monophthongs Old Norse had the diphthongs , , and , but the Norwegian spoken in the area around Setesdal has shifted two of the traditional diphthongs and innovated four more from long vowels, and, in some cases, also short vowels. West Norwegian dialects have also innovated new diphthongs. In Midtre you can find the following: Monophthongization of diphthongs The