Comments on: What’s the deal with själv?

By: Ölänning

Ölänning — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 22:22:40 +0000

@Ethan Poole – No, don’t apologize. If anything I should apologize for thinking I knew more about grammar than you. Well, I guess that’s sorted out then… Never knew you could delve so deep into one little seemingly uninteresting word like “själv”… Thanks for the grammar lesson, though!

@Anna Ikeda – I wrote my real email-address for this comment.

By: Anna Ikeda

Anna Ikeda — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 02:54:24 +0000

Ölänning,
this is Anna from the blog, I need your email address, pretty please! With sugar on top! If you could be so kind and leave a comment with an email address that you can be reached at, that would be great. Of course no one will see the address, except the folks at Transparent. Thank you so much!!!!

By: Ethan Poole

Ethan Poole — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 01:56:06 +0000

First, I apologise for using jargon and such, sometimes I forget everyone doesn’t study linguistics. I will try to clarify things a bit more.

Morphology is the study of word formation. What I meant was that I wasn’t including the words with “själv” in them, like självbetjäning or something. Since själv can be used to form part of a word *and* as a word itself, it is impossible to generalise its use (as the other of this post kind of tried to do).

“Myself” and “själv” aren’t adverbs because a noun cannot be an adverb. “I did it myself” might seem like an adverb, but this is called apposition and it still considered a regular pronoun.

“själv” is a rather confusing and complex word, no doubt about that. My point is that it *is* a reflexive pronoun, even if its usage does not mirror that of English.

A little fun fact, Swedish has a reflexive genitive pronoun: our favourite little “sin” (or sitt/sina). Most languages tend to handle reflexive pronouns quite differently. Swedish has many parallels with English, whereas Spanish and Chinese do not. The problem is that Swedish’s “själv” differs every so little that it makes it kind of confusing, especially in translation-driven instruction.

I hope that makes sense.

By: Ölänning

Ölänning — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 01:09:32 +0000

Uhmmm.. OK, I know what you’re saying. That’s alright. Just one question on that… What does “morphologically” mean?

I have to say that this just got way too complicated for me… I stand corrected, I guess… Not that I can really tell because I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about… But you seem to know a lot more about grammar than I do, at least.

But I thought “myself” and “själv” were adverbs in the sentences I wrote since they describe how the verb was done. Isn’t that the definition of an adverb? Or am I completely off?

Although, “själv” does translate into “myself” a lot of the time.

By: Ethan Poole

Ethan Poole — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:23:32 +0000

I am sorry, but själv and myself are not adverbs. It is a pronoun (and hence a noun) because it refers to something in the real world (this is an oversimplified definition). Adverbs tend to bear more association with adjectives. Many linguistics view adverbs and adjectives as the same thing because they share very similar syntactic structures.

Jag gjorde det själv.

In this case, both “jag” and “själv” are co-indexed the same thing: whoever is saying the sentence. There is nothing adverbial about “själv” or “myself” in English.

Also, I said it doesn’t translate into “myself” because of the blog post above.

“själv” is a reflexive pronoun and it can’t be otherwise unless someone can find a sentence where “själv” is not c-commanded by a subject pronoun. Obviously, we are talking syntactically and not morphologically.