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Smultron swedish to english6/10/2023 glassy (shiny, as glass), but IMO it sounds more likely to come from glossy. Which incidentally adds a whole lot of related words into the mix: glans ( gloss, shine), glansig ( glossy), glänsa ( to shine), and glänsande ( shiny).Ī correspondent on WordReference has this to say about glassig:įlashy (ostentatious, glossy) is the meaning. ![]() But what about the adjective glassig? Norstedts defines glassig as flashy, fashionable, with-it, but SAOL says: Glas has a long vowel, so does sound similar to the English glass, whereas glass has a short vowel (and long ‘s’), so sounds similar to the French glace, from which it is derived. The Swedish word sounds odd because the word gubbe commonly means old man, a word which Norstedts describes as having uncertain origin, but probably originally children’s talk for someone tjockt, klumpigt och böjt ( stout, clumsy and bent)!Īnother nice Swedish strawberry word is smultronställe = smultron + ställe ( place), which means not just a good place to find wild strawberries, but in general, a favourite haunt.Īnother two easily-confused words are glas ( glass) and glass ( icecream). And jordgubbe = jord ( earth the two words have the same Germanic root) + gubbe (a Swedish dialect word meaning little lump). The straw in strawberry may refer to the external seeds which cover the fruit. Another well-known strawberry in Sweden is the smultron, or Woodland Strawberry, Fragaria vesca, which is a diploid (two sets of seven chromosomes) species.īack to the words. And interestingly, both words are different from the name for this (accessory) fruit in other Germanic languages, for example:Īll these words refer to the Garden Strawberry, Fragaria × ananassa, the most commonly cultivated of the Fragaria species, which happens to be an octoploid (eight sets of seven chromosomes) species, and therefore apparently more robust and producing larger fruit. ![]() But after trying to learn all these grammar rules, a colleague tells me this is quite acceptable in spoken Swedish, and even passable in written Swedish, so *sigh*. That is, the bare supine form of the verb prova, where I was expecting har provat. … for you who already tried orienteering… … för dig som provat på orientering tidigare … In English, the following is quite ungrammatical to me, although it may be OK in some dialects (as it is obvious what meaning is intended)?:Īnd so I thought something similar would be true in Swedish, which was why I suspected a typo when I read (something like) the following: One exception is the class 2b verbs, such as köpa, to buy, which have a simple past tense form with t: Note that in English, the two past tense forms of weak verbs are identical and end in d, whereas in Swedish the simple past tense has a d, but the supine has a t. One feature of Germanic languages is the presence of a class of verbs (so-called weak verbs) that form the past tense by addition of a dental suffix ( d or t), as opposed to strong verbs, which have a change in vowel sound to indicate past tense: By around 200 CE, proto-Germanic had split into three branches: West Germanic (now English, German, Dutch, Frisian), North Germanic (now Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, Faroese), and East Germanic (eg Gothic now all extinct). ![]() The Germanic languages derive from a common ancestor, proto-Germanic, which is thought to date from around 500 BCE. ![]() Swedish, like English, is a Germanic language.
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