Posts under "Grammar"

Swedish Madlibs

Posted by Marcus Cederström No Comments
Feb 7 2012

We’re going to try something new here. A Swedish Madlib. I’ve used Swedish Madlibs before, at the behest of a good friend actually, and loved them. They tend to get you thinking about various grammatical forms, how to use them, and of course what words you actually know. It’s a great way to practice the language while playing.

We all know how Madlibs work right? Usually you have a second person reading off certain grammatical forms that you need. A noun here, an adjective there, maybe the name of a person. Of course, we’re online and so we’ll have to improvise. Below you will find a list of 16 blanks to fill in. In Swedish. The prompts are in Swedish, the words you choose should be in Swedish, and finally, the final product will be in Swedish.

Pick your words, and in a couple of days, we will post the remainder of the Madlib for you to fill in. Have fun and be creative!

1: Påhittat ord (använd din fantasi!) 1. __________________
2. Färg 2. __________________
3. Färg 3. __________________
4. Kroppsdel 4. __________________
5. Kroppsdel 5. __________________
6. Singular substantiv 6. __________________
7. Presens verb 7. __________________
8. Stor siffra 8. __________________
9. Jättestor siffra 9. __________________
10. Land 10. __________________
11. Land 11. __________________
12. Mat 12. __________________
13. Plural substantiv 13. __________________
14. Din favorit låt 14. __________________
15. Adjektiv 15. __________________
16. Mat 16. __________________

Why does ‘hand’ become ‘händer’ in plural?

Posted by Steve 3 Comments
Jan 24 2012

This is one question that boggles the minds of many learners of the Swedish language (as well as the other Nordic languages). Why doesn’t ‘hand’ just become ‘hander’ or ‘handar’ in plural?

The answer to this lies in a major change that occurred throughout Germanic Europe in the Early Middle Ages (which in Scandinavia was the middle of the Iron Age, 450~500 AD). The process is known today as the i-omljud in Swedish (in English the Germanic umlaut, i-umlaut, or i-mutation). What happened during this change was that an unemphasized i (prounced like ‘ee’ in modern English) in a word brought emphasized back vowels (vowels produced in the back of the mouth: a, o, u) forward, closer to i. For example, what you’re here to find out:

- The plural of hand in Old Norse was handiar. But since it is natural for human beings to simplify things, people began to say hændar (/´hændər/), combining the a with the i, creating a new sound, æ (pronounced similarly to the a in hat). From there, the æ as well as the ar at the end became more and more weakly pronounced, leading to its modern pronunciation, /´hɛndər/, orthographized as händer. The singular form, hand, however, remained the same because it lacked an i to change it.

The i-omljud also affected the other back vowels, o and u. Before this process, Old Norse only had five vowels: a, e, i, o, and u, like the rest of the Indo-European languages of that time. After the i-omljud, though, three more vowels had developed, namely y (what you get when you combine i and u), æ (i and a combined, as shown above), and ø (from i and o). The letters æ and ø were used when the Latin alphabet was first adopted but were replaced by the Low German ä and ö toward the end of the Middle Ages (in Sweden, 1050~1520 AD). Previously, Swedish was written completely in runes.

What about å then? When did that appear? Check back in one week and you’ll be able to find out!

Stop or shut?

Posted by Steve 3 Comments
Jan 17 2012

Similar to the nouns in last Tuesday’s post, there are a number of Swedish verbs that have the same infinite form but different meanings and different conjugation.

One of the best examples is the words sluta, meaning either “stop”, “end”, or “shut”, depending on its context and grammatical conjugation. It is also worth noting that sluta as “stop” or “end” is intransitive, meaning that you can not sluta something – inserting a direct object after it makes no sense. You can, however, sluta doing something or sluta med something. Here are some examples

Lektionen slutarom fem minuter. – The lesson ends in five minutes.
Sluta tjata på* mig! – Stop nagging me! (*På in this case is tied to the verb, but not emphasized. You can’t say, for example, tjata mig.)
Sluta med tjatandet! – Stop with the nagging!

[Note: If you want to "stop" something (i.e. from doing something), you can use the word stoppa. If you want to "stop" something from being in motion, use the word stanna.]

Here is the conjugation of sluta meaning “end” or “stop”:

sluta – to stop/end
slutar – stop/end, stops/ends, am/is/are stopping/ending
slutade – stopped/ended, was/were stopping/ending
har slutat – have/has stopped/ended, have/has been stopping/ending
hade slutat – had stopped/ended, had been stopping/ending


Sluta with the definition of “shut”, however, is a transitive verb, meaning that something can’t just sluta; it has to sluta something else. Here is an example:

Jag slöt ögonen och somnade. – I shut my eyes and fell asleep.

If you want to say “His eyes shut“, because sluta in this definition is transitive, you have to say either:

Hans ögon slöt sig. (if they shut themselves on their own, i.e. via reflex) or:

Hans ögon slöts. (if they were shut, most likely by him himself, saying it from a first-person, relatively literary perspective).

Sluta meaning “shut” is conjugated like so:

sluta – to shut
sluter – shut/end, shuts/ends, am/is/are shutting
slöt – shut, was/were shutting
har slutit – have/has shut, have/has been shutting
hade slutit – had shut, had been shutting

Another good example of this phenomenon is sticka, meaning either “knit” or “be off” or “leave”.

sticka – to knit sticka – to be off/leave
stickar – knit, knits, am/is/are knitting sticker – am/is/are off, leave/leaves, am/is/are leaving
stickade – knit(ted), was/were knitting stack – was/were off, left
har stickat – have/has knit(ted), have/has been knitting har stuckit – have/has left/gone
har stickat – had knit(ted), had been knitting hade stuckit – had left/gone

These are only two examples of such words. There are several more that will pop up as you learn more Swedish!

Dust or pond?

Posted by Steve 3 Comments
Jan 10 2012

There are lots of words in Swedish, just as in English, that have several meanings. One example of this relatively common phenomenon is the Swedish word damm. (Please keep in mind that the double m makes the vowel a short. If you pronounce the a long, you’re saying dam, which means ‘lady’.) Damm can mean two things: ‘dust’ and ‘pond’. Actually, it can also mean ‘dam’, but in this post I will use ‘dust’ and ‘pond’ as examples. (It has the same grammatical conjugation as damm meaning ‘pond’.)

So how do you know which one someone means? Well, just like in most cases, the meaning is relative to the context. Obviously, if someone says Det finns damm över hela mitt rum, he/she doesn’t mean “There’s a pond all over my room”.

Another important difference is the grammatical usage and conjugation of the words. Damm meaning ‘dust’ is not countable, meaning you can’t say Det finns tre damm i det här rummet, or ‘There are three dusts in this room”. However, you can say Det finns tre dammar i den här skogen, meaning “There are three ponds in this forest”.

You’ll notice that in the previous examples, the plural forms for “dust” and “pond” are different. Technically, “dust” can’t be plural at all, but since it’s a neutral-gender word (that ends in -et in definite form), I followed the general conjugation rules and left it as damm. For damm in the meaning of “pond”, however, the definite conjugation is dammar since it is a common-gender word (that ends in -en in definite form). This is what I meant by grammatical differences.

Another example is the word lag – it can mean either “team” (in neutral-gender form) or “law” (in common-gender form). The conjugations go like this:

lag (team) lag (law)
lag (teams) lagar (laws)
laget (the team) lagen (the law)
lagen (the teams) lagarna (the laws)

You may notice that lagen can both mean “the teams” or “the law”. Interpretation of this depends on the context, just like the singular, indefinite forms of lag and lag and damm and damm.

These are far from the only examples of this phenomenon in Swedish. You’re sure to come across plenty of them as you study the language in further depth!

“What is this?” in Swedish

Posted by Katja 2 Comments
Jan 6 2012

So, after looking at the feedback some of you guys sent in many of you were interested in becoming more able to have everyday conversations. I thought, since I don’t really have a good idea of what level you all are at, I start somewhere in the really basic area and work towards more complex things as we go along.

The most important phrase ever probably is “What is this in Swedish?”

Vad är det här på svenska?

This phrase is used when for example pointing at something close to you. Det här means this. You can of course substitute “det här” for “det där” (that) or “det därborta” (that over there).

Swedish English equivalent
det här

det där

det där därborta

  this

that

that over there

Vad är ______ på svenska?

In the blank you just put in the English word you don’t know in Swedish.

Vad heter _____ på svenska?

Vad kallas ________ på svenska?

The same thing applies for heter and kallas. Heter literally means “named” and kallas is not too far off from the English “is called”.

If you know how to ask about the translation one way you should be able to ask what a unknown word’s meaning is the other way around.

Vad betyder _______ på engelska?

What does ________ (the word you didn’t understand) mean in English?

Vad heter _____ på engelska? Yet again, the same thing.

Vad kallas ______ på engelska? What is ______ called in English?

Vad är _______ på engelska? What is ________ in English?

If you want to know what the word means in a language other than English here are the names for some of the languages most commonly spoken in Sweden.

Note:  in English we say “in” English and use a capital letter for the language. In Swedish they do not use capitals for languages and they say “på engelska“. Literally translated as “on English”.

Swedish English equivalent
franska

tyska

spanska

arabiska

finska

danska

norska

kinesiska

ryska

japanska

engelska

svenska

 French

German

Spanish

Arabic

Finish

Danish

Norwegian

Chinese

Russian

Japanese

English

Swedish

The words you put in the blanks can be very advanced or extremely simple.

Heres and example of a very simple word put into a conversation. Person A first asks what the word is in Swedish and then checks that they pronounced it correctly.

Person A) “Vad heter apple på svenska?”

Person B) “Det heter äpple”.

Person A) “Äppel?”

Person B) “Nej, äpp-le.”

Person A) “Äpple?”

Person B) “Ja, precis så”

Person A) “Tack”

Swedish English equivalent
ja, precis så

 

 yes, just like that

 

 

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