Add support for nynorsk language

[koen-vg]

nynorsk is supported by babel, but I guess it still needs the same hand-holding as bokmål in this thesis template.

I would love to update the documentation as well to reflect the fact that nynorsk is supported after this PR but I couldn't find the documentation as part of this repository.

[egraff]

Thank you for the PR! 🙂 The only thing I'm a bit unsure about is the translation for "acknowledgements", which I think should rather be "takkseiingar" (as "forord" is more general - and if someone wants a "forord" instead, they could either create their own page, or rename the environment).

[koen-vg]

I thought I might get pushback on that :) "Takkseiingar" isn't to be found in the dictionary and I don't think it's in common use at all. (Neither, for that matter, is "takksigelser" in this context, though it is in the dictionary.)

A quick check reveals the "Forord" is indeed the most commonly used term for the section in a thesis that would be called the "Ackowledgements" in English. For instance, I had a look at the five most recent theses in law at Institutt for kriminologi og rettssosiologi UiO (having a relatively large fraction of thesis written in Norwegian. They use:

• https://www.duo.uio.no/bitstream/handle/10852/106195/PhD-Winn%c3%a6ss-2023.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y: Forord
• https://www.duo.uio.no/bitstream/handle/10852/101210/1/PhD-Nadheim-2023.pdf: Forord
• https://phs.brage.unit.no/phs-xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/3042205/PhD-Lie-2022.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y: Tusen takk
• https://phs.brage.unit.no/phs-xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/2770841/PhD_kappe_Jakobsen.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y: Forord
• https://www.duo.uio.no/handle/10852/81116?show=full: Forord

Note that these are all in bokmål, but given that "forord" is a work in nynorsk and "takkseiingar" isn't, I don't expect to see a lot of examples of the latter.

When googling "takkseiingar", I can find two or three masters theses using this, but nothing more; it seems extremely niche.

I will note that an alternative form of "forord" is "føreord" in nynorsk, and in theory the template user might want to choose, but I'd say it's not that hard to then just modify the install thesis.cls.

Sorry for the pettiness on my part :)

[egraff]

I'm sorry it has taken me so long to reply, but I've been quite preoccupied lately (and I've also had to give your comments some proper thought) 😉

First of all, I do not agree with your claim that "takkseiing" isn't a word in Nynorsk; but, I think you are right that the use of "takksigelse(r)" and "takkseiing(ar)" might be less common in Norwegian theses and dissertations (although I do not think they are unheard of) and, in fact, that having a section called "Forord" might be more common.

However, the objection I have wrt this (and I have had some problems making my mind up 😛 ) is that "Forord" corresponds to a translation of "Preface", which isn't uncommon either in English theses. And "Preface" and "Acknowledgements" aren't the exact same thing (a preface may contain acknowledgements, but is also commonly used to contain more text than just pure acknowledgments).

The way I think I view this in the end, is that there isn't simply a one-to-one "mapping" between English and Norwegian for this particular section translation-wise, but that there are nuanced structural differences when writing your thesis in English vs Norwegian.

I've double-checked, and there isn't anything special about how the current ack environment is defined in the uit-thesis document class. It's only there as a convenience, and isn't mandated or depended on in the document layout, so anyone is free to write their own sections as part of the frontmatter. There could be a case for defining a similar environment for a "Preface"/"Forord", but I don't think that falls within the scope of this PR. For now, at least, I won't accept "Forord" as a translation of "Acknowledgements" (also given the current precedence from the standard Norwegian and Northern Sami translations) 🙈

Finally, there is another slight snag wrt this PR. I really appreciate getting suggestions for how to improve the uit-thesis document class, especially when the work is pretty much done for me (that is definitely a rare thing) 🙂 unfortunately, the biggest chunk of work still remains, which is to write tests for the added "functionality" 😅 and because of security concerns (read, PDF is a ...problematic file format), this is something I will have to do myself. I can reference your contribution in some new commits, when I get around to do that work, but I won't be able to merge this PR directly...