Cunning Linguistics

Just thought I'd wrtite a little about some of the strangeness of Swedish. I dont want to try and summarise a whole language or all of the things that can go wrong. In fact, just a list of my misunderstandings could probably slow down the whole internet, and that would be just the ones I've recognised at the time. But there are some words and phrases that catch my attention a bit more than they should do. Partly because of the strange pronounciation, partly because of the unfortunate similarity to English. And you have to remember, I am easily amused.

For most words/phrases I will give the Swedish word, then an approximation of the pronounciation in English, and the meaning.

slut - "sloot", rhymes with "loot" - and often appears in places you don't expect it to: means "end" or "finish"

sex - "sex" - again appears everywhere and is just "6".

skit - "huit" - something you will find on most recent Aussie sketch comedy shows: shit

här i kanal fem - "hairy kanal fem" - here on Ch.5. I love the hairy tv channels.

frivillig - "freevilly" - voluntarily, but the sentence I heard was "I did Free Willy" and got confused

kyss - "kuss" sorta like "puss" - kiss (v.). Another Swedish word for kiss is actually "puss" (n.)

kiss - "kiss" - wee

skägg - "shagg" - beard. And hairy, or bearded, is "shäggig". What's that, Scooby?...

spyr - "spewr" - vomit. The official word, not the slang one.

Wella Balsam Shampoo - "Wella Balsam Hampoo" which leads me to...
...a whole range of sounds in Swedish that are difficult to pronounce and spell and cause lots of confusion. Basically anything in English that pronounced or written with "sh" or "ch" is written in Swedish with sk, sj stj, or tj, or k before certain dotted vowels. The pronounciation varies with dialect (up here in the north, they tend to be more like "sh" and all sound similar) but elswehere there are big differences, enough for me to be misunderstood in Stockholm. There are heap or words that start with basically just the 'h' of 'sh', with barely a hint of the 's' or 'c' before it.

exempel: 'information' as written can be pronounced like "informashorn", "informahorn", and "informaforn". I quite like the idea of an informa-phone.

Also, another difficulty is that when letters like t, k, s, and g become soft, it is really hard to follow the text that people are reading, even when i have it written in front of me, such as in the uni review that I am in. So a sentence like:

Sjutton generade sjätteklassare sjunger Tjeckiska skitsånger (17 embarassed 6th graders sing Czech crap songs) sounds like:

hutton yenerade hätteklassare hoonger hweckiska huitsonger

Or

Skiva skära skinkan skevt (cut the pink ham unevenly) sounds like:
hwiva hwara huinkan hweft

Another beauty of the language is the tendency to make long words. They just keep sticking bits together. I don't have any hugely long examples to hand, but 2-3 english word groups are quite common. Some examples

arbetsmarknadsvecka (Job Fair Week)
förpackningspappersföretag (pagaging paper company)

The Swedish version of 'have a good one' is 'Har det så bra' - literally 'Have it so good'.


And then there is of course, the northern swedish dialect form of saying 'yes' - the suck. Let's work up to it:

- 'Yes' in standard Swedish is 'ja', pronounced 'yah' basically like in German, often with a drawn out 'preciiiiis' after it.

- A little less formally, we have 'jo'.

- next comes 'jo', but rather than using the voical cords, you must inhale so that it is very breathy, kinda like if you've just been surprised by something: "yhoh"

- now just get rid of the word bit all together, and breathe in and make a stronger sucking noise like "fffft", as if you were sucking up a peice of spaghetti. That's it. And it is used a lot like aizuchi in Japanese - you can hear someone on the phone or listening to someone just going ffft, ffft, ffft, ffft, every couple of seconds.

So what do the Swedes do to English...?

Well, it depends on who you talk to. But basically, most people around the uni are almost perfectly fluent in English, without the stereotypical accent that would be expected. The opposite of the pronounciation problems occurs, with words like jacket, and john being pronounced like "yacket", and "yon". 'Constellation' ("constellahorn") gets used alot to mean 'conglomeration', sometimes is the 'rs' sound is like 'rsh' as in Swedish, eg. 'parts' becomes "partsh". A common mistake is not getting the difference between 'much' and 'alot' right - I often hear sentences like "i did it quite much when I was a shild".
(I know it's petty, but I spend so much time getting it wrong in Swedish it is good sometimes to be certain about something occasionally).

If you want to listen to some of the Swedish examples given above, go to:

http://www.slayradio.org/mastering_swedish_lesson_3.php

You can listen to a brave brit trying to pronounce them, and look at the examples at the same time. Unsurprisingly a few expletives are generated in the attempt. The other lessons are good, too.