v47: vaccinera

What is a reflexive verb? Wikipedia gives a semantic definition: a reflexive verb is a verb whose semantic agent and patient are the same. For example, the English verb to perjure is reflexive, since one can only perjure oneself. However, I’d prefer to say that a reflexive verb is one that enters into reflexive constructions, that is, grammatical constructions that can have a reflexive meaning. In Swedish and English, these constructions involve the use of reflexive pronouns. In Swedish, the reflexive pronouns are mig, dig, sig, oss, er, sig; that is, the same as the object pronouns apart from the third person sig. In English, the reflexive pronouns are myself, yourself, himself, etc. In English, reflexive pronouns can also be used as intensifiers; the equivalent Swedish intensifier is själv.

Swedish verbs can enter into reflexive constructions in more ways than English verbs. Some have direct equivalents in English:

Jag tvättar mig.

I wash myself.

Words like the above also have the same meaning in English and Swedish when used in a normal (nonreflexive) transitive sense, with or without the intensifier:

Jag tvättade bilen. Jag tvättade bilen själv.

I washed the car. I washed the car myself.

However, there are also many transitive/reflexive pairs which differ somewhat in meaning, such as lära (teach)/lära sig (learn), tänka (think)/tänka sig (imagine). Compare the following; both are reflexive constructions in Swedish, but only one is in English:

Sara lär sig finska. Sara lär sig finska själv.

Sara is learning Finnish. Sara is teaching herself Finnish.

Some Swedish verbs can only be used reflexively, such as bete sig (behave), försova sig (oversleep), huka sig (crouch down), bry sig om (care about).

And then (although this is by no means intended to be an exhaustive list), there is a group of verbs where the meaning is of having something done to oneself by someone else, a reflexive construction but not one that fits neatly with the simple (agent=patient) definition of reflexive: klippa sig (get one’s hair cut), vaccinera sig (get vaccinated) (if you can!).

v46: glögg

Glögg is Swedish mulled wine, and now is the season for drinking it. The word glögg is derived from glödga, to warm up. The English word mull, similarly, means to warm up, spice, and sweeten wine. So my question is, if glögg is (by definition) warm, does the bottle contain glögg?

Each year since 2003, Blossa has brought out an annual glögg flavour (available since the first week of October!). Just so you know, Blossa claims to be the market leader for glögg in Sweden. Blossa is owned by V&S (Vin & Spirit AB), maybe best known for Absolut Vodka. V&S was founded in 1917 as a national monopoly for the production, import, export and wholesale trade of alcoholic beverages in Sweden, and was only recently (July 2008) sold by the Swedish government to the French giant Pernod Ricard (they own everything not owned by Diageo). This year’s flavour is Clementin(e).

Glödlampa is Swedish for incandescent bulb. Now have you figured out that glö- is related to glow? But the bulb in the box is neither incandescent or glowing.

What would be your reaction if I offerred you a glass of glögg and gave you something cold, straight from the bottle? Think about coffee (another popular drink here): if you ask for coffee, you expect it to be served hot. But cold coffee is still coffee, and when I buy coffee from the supermarket, it is not even a liquid. So I think we have to admit that the definition of glögg must be expanded to include the non-heated version. Alcohol-free glögg and decaffeinated coffee? You will have to puzzle those out for yourself.

The current (13th) edition of SAOL lists a number of words beginning with glö-. They are either glöd- or glög- words, as described, or glöm- words, from glömma, forget. SAOL is kind enough to provide list of words left out in moving from the 12th to the 13th edition. One word I already miss is glöta, to dig around. This would have been the last word in the glö- series, but I’m happy to make do with the next word in the list, g-moll, which sounds like someone you might meet in a speakeasy, but is in fact G-minor.

After ten editions of “words from sweden”, it’s time for some good news and some bad news. The good news is that there are plenty more interesting words for me to write about, I hope to continue for a while yet. The bad news is that I’ll be cutting back on the picture clues for next week’s word. Mainly because it means I won’t have to think two weeks ahead for each post, but also because I want to explore areas of grammar which are difficult to photgraph (but I’ll try), and other words where I’d like a photograph of my own, but can’t get one. But mainly because I don’t want to think two weeks ahead.

See you next week!

v45: klippa/skära

I’ve been studying verbs that describe cutting and breaking, events of material separation, or C&B if you will [Majid A, et al. How similar are semantic categories in closely related languages? A comparison of cutting and breaking in four Germanic languages. Cognitive Linguistics 2007; 18(2): 179-194]. It turns out that this is an interesting thing to study across languages, because C&B is a fairly universal concept (tools for the purpose having been fashioned millions of years ago), and because C&B events involve what we may regard as prototypical verbs: somoeone does something to something, resulting in a change of state.

But then it gets complicated. Languages typically have over 20 verbs that can be used to describe C&B events. Some events are associated with a specific verb (saw), whereas some aren’t (crush, pound, pulverise, smash).

The simple answer to last week’s question: in English, both the scissors and the knife cut. In Swedish there is no single word for cut; what scissors do is klippa (same origin as English clip), and what knives do is skära (same origin as English shear). As with English, German has a single word for cut (schneiden), whereas Dutch has the scissors/knife distinction (knippen/snijden). English/German/Dutch/Swedish all have a specific word for saw (saw/sägen/zagen/såga).

Interesting, but so what? Well, it does have implications for both second language learning and translation. My Norstedts Stora Engelsk-Svenska Ordbok, under cut, lists skära, hugga, klippa, snoppa, meja av, slå, fälla, utesluta, and more, with little indication of how to choose between them. Examples for klippa are (I quote) “[~ a film (tape); ~ a hedge]“. From the above, I would have thought of cutting hair as a good obvious example. Using klippa for hedges makes me think of some sort of large pair of scissors, but in fact, the electric instrument typically used for cutting hedges is a häcksax (hedge-scissors) (at right), and it certainly has more than one blade. The same dictionary also has an entry hedge-cutter = häckklippare. I hope that’s all clear now!

A final note: scissors (plural) = en sax (singular). Perhaps more on that in a future post.

Next week:

What’s in the bottle? (Hint: What’s in the box?)

v44: lördag

I was taught that the days of the week in English were named for Germanic gods (plus the sun and the moon), so it’s reasonable to expect the names to be similar in Swedish. Let’s have a look:

Monday = måndag
Tuesday = tisdag
Wednesday = onsdag
Thursday = torsdag
Friday = fredag
Saturday = lördag
Sunday = söndag

Well, the similarities are obvious, apart from lördag. It turns out that Saturday is named for Saturn, who was a Roman, rather than Germanic, god. What about lördag? According to Wikipedia, the name derives from the old habit of bathing on this day (löga = bathe).

However, a much more important tradition observed on Saturdays in modern-day Sweden is that of lördagsgodis (Saturday sweets). Apparently this dates back to the 1950s/1960s as an effort to prevent tooth decay. That is, tooth decay would be reduced if children ate sweets on only one day per week. Reasonable enough, you may think, but the background to this is rather dark.

The Vipeholm experiments were carried out on the background of poor dental health in Sweden at that time, and involved the (essentially) force-feeding of high carbohydrate toffee (Vipeholm toffee, “specially formulated to maximise retention of the sugar on the teeth”) to a group of patients at the Vipeholm institute for the mentally retarded in Lund during 1945-1955.  These experiments led to a very good understanding of the relationship between sugar intake and tooth decay, but flew in the face of modern medical ethical principles. Even back then, the Nuremberg Code, outlined in 1947, specified the need for consent, which was not obtained (from either the subjects, their next-of-kin, or patient representatives) at Vipeholm.

Dental health in Sweden is now excellent, owing to a combination of fluoridated toothpaste, widespread availability of dental services, promotion of dental hygeine, and lördagsgodis. But not fluoridated water. I wouldn’t put you through the pain of trying to use the internet to research water fluoridation, as it’s one of those areas dominated by pressure groups and pseudo-science, but you may be interested to know, contrary to what you may hear, that water fluoridation was never banned in Sweden; instead Parliament in 1971 repealed an Act which allowed water fluoridation (for example, read here). Not being allowed is not the same thing as being banned, is it?

Enjoy your godis!

Next week:

What verb do these two instruments have in common?

v43: skär

I just read an article (Taft C, Sivik L. Salient color terms in four languages. ScandJPsych 1997; 38: 29-34), which looked at lists of colour names elicited from subjects in four languages, including Swedish.

Their findings were compared to Berlin and Kay’s description of 11 basic colour terms (white, black, gray, red, green, blue, yellow, orange, brown, purple, pink).

An interesting result (according to Taft and Sivik) was that there are two words for pink in Swedish: rosa (mentioned by 100% of subjects) and skär (mentioned by 80%), and also for purple: lila and violett (both 100%). I hadn’t heard of skär (in the colour sense), so I checked with colleagues, who said skär is not really a common word for pink, and is used when talking about unpleasant shades of pink. So Swedish has the word grisskär (pig-pink). Sorry, pigs!

I also learnt that lila is the most common word for purple, but there are further alternatives, including purpur and gredelin (from the French gris de lin, ‘flax gray’) . So I looked up the terms for purple on Google. Google Sweden gives the following simple search options: webben (the web) ; sidor på svenska (pages in Swedish); sidor från Sverige (pages from Sweden). I searched for five words meaning purple (or shades thereof) in Swedish, and found the following numbers of hits:

	webben	på svenska	från Sverige
lila	16,400,000	877,000	796,000
purpur	590,000	28,500	21,600
violett	2,160,000	54,000	47,100
gredelin	79,900	66,400	461,000
indigo	28,600,000	130,000	146,000

What do you notice? Well, for one thing, I seem to be totally useless at formatting tables. Any ideas, please let me know. Secondly, what’s bizarre is that gredelin has more hits from Sweden than it does from the web in total. Huh?? Thirdly, I guess we can agree that lila is the commonest term here for purple, but gredelin is definitely a good second choice. Plus, it sounds much more sophisticated, don’t you think?

(This kind of search won’t work for rosa/skär, because skär has a number of other meanings, including skerry and cut.)

Taft and Sivik also found that one Berlin and Kay non-basic colour term, beige, was mentioned by 100% of subjects, putting it ahead of both skär and grå (gray).

Back to this week’s word, I’d always believed that a French charcuterie was a pork butcher, but it’s actually a specialist in cooked meats (from chair, ‘flesh’ + cuit, ‘cooked’). Swedish has essentially the same word charkuteri (abbreviated as chark, see last week’s photo). And guess what? From the French chair is derived the Swedish skär, that is, the colour of flesh! Pig flesh, obviously.

Next week:

What day is it today?

v42: lök

I am an onion. Last week’s picture, that is, is a spring onion (salladslök or knipplök; Allium fistulosum). Actually I am a bit of an onion also: I was supposed to buy spring onions at the supermarket, but bought chives (gräslök; Allium schoenoprasum) instead. Onion in Swedish is lök. The prototypical onion is Allium cepa, which has many varieties, including silverlök (white onion), rödlök (red [Spanish] onion), gul lök (brown onion), and schalottenlök (shallot). Other related vegetables are purjolök (leek; Allium ampeloprasum var. porrum), and vitlök (garlic; Allium sativum). Lök also means bulb or bud, as in tulpanlök (tulip bulb) and smaklök (taste bud).

I’m still a little puzzled as to why it’s silverlök and rödlök but not *gullök (see two weeks ago for the discussion of särskrivning).

I hadn’t previously thought of either chives or garlic as being onions. The English names don’t make it obvious, whereas the Swedish ones do; I thought this was an intersting example of how even nouns can be categorised differently in two such closely-related languages as English and Swedish. I guess this will be a fruitful (vegetableful?) topic for further discussion.

Although they seem at first to be very different words, the derivations of the names of the vegetables in English and Swedish are rather interesting and overlapping: Onion in Latin is cepa (from which chives is derived, via the French cive). In Greek, apparently (my knowledge of Greek is pretty non-existent) leek is praso [πράσο] and green is prasino [πράσινο], hence the species name of leeks and chives, as well as the element Praseodymium. Leek, lök, and the -lic in garlic are related. The porrum in the botanical name for leek gives both the purjo- in purjolök, and porridge.

Next week:

I said I’d talk about colour terms again. Pigs have come in for a bit of a bashing lately thanks to swine flu. What colour are pigs?

v41: paj

As Wikipedia says, A loanword (lånord) is a word borrowed from one language and incorporated into another, however neither loanword nor borrowing correctly conveys the meaning, since no words are going to be returned.

The Romani people migrated out of India around the 11th Century CE, through the Middle East and into Europe. Romani is one of Sweden’s five official minority languages (a nice trivia question for you there); according to Språkrådet, there are around 40,000 Romani speakers in Sweden. Språkrådet lists the following Romani loanwords into Swedish: tjej (girl), haja (understand), lattjo (funny) and jycke (dog).

But the word I’m interested in, that Språkrådet doesn’t mention, is paj (broken).

As you know, in English and in Swedish, most adjectives can be placed either before the noun (attributive) or after the noun (predicative) [I know that's not a good definition of attributive and predicative, but it will do for now]:

The big house. The house is big.

Det stora huset. Huset är stort.

But there’s a group of adjectives that don’t have this flexibility in English:

The fomer president. *The president is former.

The main reason. *The reason is main.

The man is alone. *The alone man.

(The asterisk here means the sentence is ungrammatical.) In general, the English adjectives above are reference-modifying, that is, they describe the context that the noun is in. Compare alone with lonely:

The man is lonely. The lonely man.

Lonely is referent-modifying, that is, just describing the noun itself. Similarly, in Swedish, there are also adjectives that are restricted to either attributive or predicative use. The attributive-only seem to be reference modifying:

I fjärran länder. In foreign parts.

Det dåtida Stockholm. The Stockholm of that time.

But I can’t see a pattern for the predicative only:

Arbetet var slut. Work had finished.

Bilen är sönder. The car is broken-down.

Slut and sönder may look as though they are somehow related in meaning, but then there are other words meaning broken, such as trasig, that can be used both attributively and predicatively. So maybe there’s just no rule to learn? My grammar book just says that some indeclinable adjectives can only be used attributively, some can only be used predicatively, and some can be used both ways. It doesn’t say whether there are any declinable adjectives that can only be used attributively or predicatively. What about paj? There seems to be no problem with the predicative use (Min dator är paj), but I can’t find any good examples of attributive use, or other forms of the adjective, even though they are suggested here.

The much more common meaning for paj is pie, in which case it’s a loan word from English. And there is the answer to last week’s picture clue: adjectives + bakery = paj. By the way, the best known (possibly the only non-slang) Romani loanword in English is pal.

Next week, let’s talk about food again:

What am I?

v40: dold

Compound words, particularly compound nouns, are common in Swedish. Swedish is more likely to have a compound noun where English might use a compound, a hyphen, or two separate words, for example vattenskyddsområde (water protection area). But of course, it’s not that simple: for example järnväg (railway) is a compound in both languages, but English is reluctant to extend the exercise: järnvägslinje (railway line).

Back to last week’s question: Norstedts lists the following: lögndetektor (lie detector), mindetektor (mine detector), and rökdetektor (smoke detector). But dold detektor means hidden detector. So I guess if we want to look for rules, we might say that the compound noun, made up of first element (FE) + second element (SE), is a specific type of SE, whereas separate words are used for a description of a general SE.

The following example works equally well in Swedish and English: blåbär (blueberries) are a specific type of berry, whereas blå bär (blue berries) are any old berries that happen to be blue.

That simple rule won’t cover everything, and a lot seems to me to depend on the differences between the ways adjectives work in Swedish and English. Contrast: en kort hårig flicka (a short, hairy girl) vs en korthårig flicka (a short-haired girl); or rök fritt (smoke freely; ie, smoking allowed) vs rökfritt (smoke-free; ie, smoking prohibited).

There is a phenomenon in Swedish called särskrivning (separated writing), which refers to the incorrect use of separate words where a compound is correct. If you want to see the kind of fervor this stirs up, have a look at skrivihop.nu. While the “short-haired girl” example above provides a nice example of how linguistic functions are realised differently in English and Swedish, I do find it hard to take seriously the argument that särskrivning would result in any serious misunderstandings. But they do offer this helpful piece of advice: Om det uttalas som ett sammansatt ord skall det också skrivas som ett sammansatt ord! (If it is pronounced as a compound word, it is also written as a compound word!) Yeah, right.

Next week:

How many Romani loan words (or loanwords or even loan-words?) do you know, and what does the picture have to do with anything?

v39: rida

I still struggle with the fact that in Swedish one doesn’t ride a bicycle. That is, the word rida (ride) is not used in connection with bicycles. As Norstedts puts it:

rida <ride on a horse>

Or, I suppose, on a donkey, cow, elephant, whatever. My Swedish colleagues give me funny looks whenever I talk about “riding to work”. I guess they’re wondering where’s my horse (donkey, cow, elephant, …)? It would however be equally wrong to say “riding a bicycle to work”; the correct word to use is cykla (cycle). However, Norstedts again:

fara, åka <…, ride on a bicycle, …>

Norstedts doesn’t even believe that cycling is a form of riding! Åka cykel means go by bike, and applies also to being in a child seat on a bicycle, or a passenger on the crossbar or handlebars, for example (in Australia, that’s a dink, or a donkey if you’re from South Australia).

Here is a sign that caused me some confusion. What do you think?:

Not so simple, is it? My colleague reckons it should be either “Moped- och cykelåkning förbjuden” (note the hyphen), or maybe “Mopedåkning och cykling förbjuden”.

It occurred to me that in English, it’s not only the vehicle that gets driven, but also the passengers within (Drive me to the airport, cabbie!). I wonder if the same is true in Swedish?

Next week:

This sign is on the ceiling just outside my office door. I wondered what is the dold that this detektor is hoping to detect – smoke, fire, radiation perhaps? How would a little knowledge of Swedish morphology have helped me out here?

v38: blå(sa)

Coming back through Arlanda airport recently, I noticed an advertisement with the word blåsig, which my colleague said meant windy, as in blåsa (to blow), and wasn’t related to the word blå (blue). But the sky is blue, and the wind blows out of the sky, so do you think those words really could be related?

In fact, etymological dictionaries say that blå and blue are certainly related, deriving from a common Proto-Indo-European (PIE) base, *bhle-was (or maybe *bhleuos) “light-colored, blue, blond, yellow”. It seems that PIE speakers weren’t too fussy about their colour words; the Latin flavus “yellow” is also derived from the same root. [The * means there is no written example of the PIE word, it was "reconstructed" from known languages.]

Similarly, blåsa and blow are related, deriving from PIE *bhle- (or *bhel-) “to swell, blow up”.

All of which doesn’t really help in answering what I thought was a fairly simple question. In fact I had to go all the way back to PIE, which is supposed to have been spoken around 6000 years ago (and not written down), to not get a good answer. I could stick with my original theory, but I guess that’s not a very scientific way to study etymology. However, I did find out a lot about Swedish colour terms, and the history of the Swedish language, for future posts.

Next week:

There are a lot of bicycles in Sweden, but they hardly ever get ridden. Why not?