I want to point out that I am a non-native speaker of English.  My mother tongue is Swedish which is the other language of this website.  While these languages are clearly similar they are not mutually understandable.  For one thing Swedish lack the heavy French influence English has had from the Middle Ages and on.  Instead, our vocabulary is largely a mix of Icelandic (for the oldest and most common words) and Dutch (for most of the rest).  In addition, there are differences in linguistic usage.  So if I express myself a bit weirdly it is my mother tongue shining though.

Standard Swedish does not have any diphthongs.  I can only pronounce the diphthongs found in my parents’ dialects.  Similarly, I can’t pronounce ð (the th in this).  I can pronounce θ (the th in thanks) but have to make a conscious effort to do so.  Otherwise it becomes f.  Combined with the frequent disconnect between spelling and pronunciation these explain my marked Swedish accent.

On the other hand Swedish has a handful of sounds which don’t exist in English.  The only consonant I can come up with is ђ.  It is said to be unique to Swedish and Norwegian.  Among the vowels we have ū, ө, y and ү.  On top of all this Swedish is a pitch-accent language.  However, if you put the stress on the right syllable this and context is enough to make people understand.  These are the only differences made by the dialects of the Swedish minority in mainland Finland.

Curiously, Swedish lack a word for please.  The closest thing we have is the word for kind.  It is used informally as a shortened form of the phrase would you be so kind.  The word for thanks can be used in some situations.  But such a word is considered mostly superfluous.  Swedish does not have quite as many phrases of politeness as English have.

Neither does Swedish have any word for do.  Usually there is a clear distinction between a noun and a verb.  This makes the word do mostly superfluous.  When such a word is needed the word for make is used.  This ambiguity was once used for comical effect in a short comic (two comic book pages).  A woman leaves her hyperactive son alone in their kitchen for a while.  When she comes back she finds the kitchen in a mess.  She then exclaims:

Vad har du gjort?

She means “what have you done?”  However, he misunderstand it as “what have you made?”  So he happily answers:

Knäck!

Her reaction is to this is ja, jag ser det meaning “yes, I see”.  The last word in that sentence means it which is mandatory in Swedish.

Also, Swedish nouns are either animate or inanimate.  This is a grammatical rule and does not always reflect the nature of what the word refers to.  These categories determine which form of a/an, it and the suffix equivalent of the is used.  Old Norse had three such grammatical categories: masculine, feminine and neuter.  But over the course of 400 years the masculine and feminine categories merged into the animate one.  The neuter category then become the inanimate.  Adjectives can still be inflected in masculine.  However, this reflects the gender of a person or the sex of an animal.  This infliction is optional too.

On the other hand Swedish lack plural forms of verbs.  Unfortunately, they disappeared from spoken language a couple of centuries before disappearing from written.  This lead to ungrammatical writing like the spring are here!  (This is a direct translation of a phrase when spring is in singular.)  Nowadays, many people misunderstand these forms as archaic rather than plural.

Native speakers of English unfamiliar with any other language probably find these differences strange.  But they are perfectly normal differences found in clearly related languages.  Actually, English and Swedish share a common origin in the Iron Age.  Languages without a traceable common origin may vary enormously.  You might not understand anything of what somebody say.  Yet with rare exceptions they mean something by it.

 

Uploaded on the 17th of October 2024.