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?)
words from sweden 
If you look up ‘häcksax’ in Wikipedia
(http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A4cksax) you will find a picture of both the original version which is indeed a large pair of scissors, and the newer version which is electrical or enginge driven and doesn’t look like a pair of scissors and would be better called a ‘häck-klippare’ (hedgecutter).