The word #19: dygnsrytm

Just 279 days after my last post, I’m back with the sixth monovocalic word; the noun dygnsrytm. It can be translated as ‘day-rhythm’, but dygn specifically means the entire 24 hour period. Therefore, the meaning is something like ‘the timing of an individual's sleep-wake cycle’, as the abstract of this study expresses it.

Since Sweden is so far north, the Earth’s axial tilt leads to a big variation in sunset and sunrise during the year, and this can mess with people’s dygnsrytm. Even in the very south of Sweden, Midsummer in June has 17 hours of sunlight while Midwinter in December only has 7 hours. And the very north of Sweden sees midnattssol ‘midnight-sun’ from late May to mid-July, meaning that the sun never sets below the horizon. (Here’s a timelapse example from Alaska.)

Having the short word dygn for ‘24 hours’ means if something is open 24 hours, Swedes say that it’s open dygnet runt ‘the dygn round’. And if you add -a to create the verb dygna, it means ‘to stay awake for 24 hours’.

The last three monovocalisms will feature the exotic vowels å, ä and ö. For å, we might learn more about blåshål ‘blowhole’, påbrå ‘ancestry’, våldsvåg ‘wave of violence’ or tågrån ‘train robbery’.

The word #18: ljushuvud

It’s been 1,141 days since my last post – 681 days quicker than the gap before that! It can only mean that this blog is finally picking up some steam.

The fifth monovocalic word in my series is the noun ljushuvud. The literal meaning is ‘light-head’, but it has nothing to do with low blood pressure, but rather one’s cognitive abilities. It’s best translated as ‘bright person’ or ‘clever person’.

However, as sometimes happens with words like this, it’s often used with a negation (inget ljushuvud ‘not very bright’) or sarcastically, a bit like English ‘genius’:

Vad är det för ett ljushuvud som har kommit på något så urbota dumt? ‘Who’s the genius who came up with this stupid thing?’

Jag var inget ljushuvud i skolan och hade svårt att stava och allt sånt. ‘I was no genius at school and I had problems with spelling and all that.’

Two related monovocalic words are dumhuvud (‘stupid-head’) and brushuvud (‘roar-head’, i.e. ‘hot-headed or quick-tempered person’).

There are also words that use skalle instead of huvud. Skalle is related to English ‘skull’ and has a similar meaning, but it can also be used in a derogatory manner about people. Here are some compounds whose first part is metaphorical, and they can all be translated as ‘a stupid person’:

fårskalle ‘sheep-skull’

korkskalle ‘cork-skull’

pappskalle ‘paper-skull’

tjockskalle ‘fat-skull’

träskalle ‘wood-skull’

There are many parallels in English, like 'airhead', 'blockhead', 'meathead', 'hardhead' and 'fathead'.

In my earlier post about how animal names can be used metaphorically, I mentioned that the verb tjura (from tjur ’a bull’) means ‘to be grumpy, to sulk’. But if you combine tjur with skalle and turn it into an adjective, the resulting word tjurskallig means 'obstinate, stubborn’ – much like English ‘pig-headed’.

And finally: if you use skallig on its own (lit. ‘skull-y’), it means ‘bald’.

The next vowel in this series will be y, so we might look closer at blytyngd ‘lead weight’, nybryggd ‘freshly brewed’, ynkrygg ‘coward’ or even psykbryt ‘mental breakdown’.

The word #17: orosmoln

It’s been 1,822 days since my last post, so let’s get on with it!

For the fourth monovocalic word, I give you orosmoln. Its literal translation is 'worry-cloud', and although it has a very concrete origin as a sign of an approaching storm, it's more commonly used today as a metaphor for a disconcerting sign or bad omen of any kind; from international economy to a sports team's key player getting injured.

The word is written with three o's, but is pronounced something like [ˈuːruːsˌmɔln] with two different vowel sounds. The noun oro 'worry' has nothing to do with gold, but is further analysable into the negating prefix o- and the noun ro 'calm, peace'.

Moln 'cloud' can be traced back to older Germanic forms, but it has all but disappeared in other Germanic languages. To my (slightly biased) ears, the sounds in moln fit the fluffy appearance of a cumulus cloud perfectly. Just try yourselves: moln. Repeat until convinced.

The next vowel up is u – could it be djursjukhus ‘animal hospital’, kugghjul ‘cogwheel’ or perhaps struphuvud ‘larynx’?

The word #16: tillfriskningstid

We move on to the third vowel in the alphabet: i, and the monovocalic word is tillfriskningstid.

This word is based around the root frisk 'healthy, well', and the "-na method" of creating verbs from adjectives. Some of these verbs also take a prefix, like till-, turning frisk into tillfriskna 'recover'. From that verb, we derive the noun tillfriskning 'recovery', which is compounded with tid 'time' to get a word meaning something like 'recovery period'.

The adjective frisk [frɪsk] was borrowed from Low German vrisch, and is used today in much the same way as English 'fresh': about anything from tastes and smells to more abstract concepts like thoughts. The main difference is, as above, that Swedish uses frisk about people and other living creatures, unlike English 'fresh'. However, in certain cases, e.g. about food, Swedish uses the related adjective färsk [fæʂk], another Low German borrowing, which also corresponds to English 'fresh' in its usage.

English 'fresh' is a surviving Germanic word, which was long ago borrowed into the Romance languages, giving e.g. Italian fresco and French fraîche. The latter was then borrowed into Swedish as fräsch [frɛːʃ], which is nowadays used about tastes and smells, but also about things like hygiene, fashion and design. (In the latter two cases, there is probably some contemporary influence from English fresh.)

To wrap it up, there are at least three Swedish equivalents of English 'fresh': frisk, färsk, and fräsch, with both differing and overlapping usage, and I'm sure I've missed some of those:

Now for the "silly" part, namely language games! Most languages have versions in which words or syllables are manipulated, moved around, etc. English has Pig Latin, French has Javanais, etc. There are of course several Swedish varieties as well, and while some are filled with slang words and connected to certain professions (skinnarmål, knoparmoj, månsing), others are simple manipulations of words and syllables in Standard Swedish.

One is rövarspråket 'the thief language', in which every consonant is doubled with an o [ɔ] between: Vem är det? 'Who is that?' becomes vovemom äror dodetot? [vɔvemɔm ærɔr dɔdetɔt], and the name of the language is rorövovarorsospoproråkoketot. While it's easy to decode in writing, it's quite hard to understand a "fluent" speaker if you lack training in the language.

The reason I'm bringing this up under the letter i is the perhaps stupidest secret language I know of: i-språket (or i-sprikit), i.e. "the i-language". The rule is very simple: replace any vowel with i! Vem är det? becomes vim ir dit? [vim ir diːt]. The fact that many sentences in i-sprikit are fully intelligible to most Swedes corroborates the expression “Vowels are the emotion, and consonants are the intellect.”.

If you want to hear i-sprikit in use, here's a sketch from the Swedish comedy show Lorry, from the early 1990s. In the clip, the woman in the red dress (Gunilla Röör) is speaking i-sprikit. The man at the far right (Johan Ulveson) is instead replacing all consonants with g, which makes him impossible to understand.

Next up is o, with candidates like blodomlopp 'blood circulation', plommonstop 'bowler hat', and trolldomskonst 'art of sorcery'.

The word #15: medveten

On to the second monovocalic word in my little journey through Swedish vowels. After a comes e, and the word is the adjective medveten.

This word can be translated as 'aware, conscious', and it can be nominalised as medvetenhet 'awareness, consciousness', and its definite form is medvetenheten. Monovocalism galore!

At the morpheme level, we get med-vet-en 'with-know-ing', which is basically a calque ("loan translation") of Latin conscire, which also consists of con 'with' and scire 'know'. The Latin construction is the basis for English words like 'conscience' and 'conscious'. From the same base, Swedish also creates medvetande 'consciousness', which has a more philosophical or academic ring to it than medvetenhet above.

Now, while medveten can mean both 'aware' and 'conscious', the two meanings are kept apart in negation. The regular derivation o-medveten means 'unaware', but 'unconscious' is medvets-lös, i.e. 'consciousness-less'. This second derivation is based on the word medvet(t); an older, defunct word for 'consciousness'. Again we see how most irregularities and quirks are the result of language change over time, and how forms and meanings may disappear from use as independent words, but survive as fossils in various derivations and compounds (e.g. 'meat' in 'sweetmeat' in my last post).

Next time, the letter i, with candidates like principvidrig 'adverse to principles', smittspridning 'spread of contagion', invigningsrit 'initiation rite', and I promise a healthy dose of silliness as well!

The word #14: vardagsmat

I haven’t updated in quite a while, so I tried to be creative through constraints à la Oulipo, and I've set out to find some interesting Swedish words containing the same vowel, or 'monovocalismes' as the French call it.

But we'll set out from a very non-creative starting point; the letter a. There are a couple of candidates, like anslagstavla 'notice board', damlandslag 'female national team', magkatarr 'gastritis', and rakbladsvass 'razor-sharp', but I've chosen vardagsmat.

This word is a three part compound – [var-dag]s-mat – meaning 'every-day-food'. First, let's look at vardag, which means 'weekday' or 'workday'. It also means 'everyday' in several compounds, like vardagsproblem 'everyday problems', vardagsspråk 'everyday, informal language use', vardagstristess 'the everyday humdrum', and of course vardagsrum 'living room'.

Now, when it comes to vardagsmat, the literal meaning is ordinary, non-festive food, but the word is often used figuratively, meaning 'everyday fare' or 'everyday life':

Att prova på nya saker är vardagsmat för henne. Trying new things is everyday fare for her / something she does often.

–30 grader är vardagsmat i Norrland. Minus 30 degrees (–22°F) is common in Norrland (northern Sweden).

Elitistisk laglöshet var vardagsmat under Khaddafi. Elitist lawlessness was the norm during Qaddafi's rule.

Now to the last part of that compound, mat 'food', which actually has the same origins as the English word 'meat'! In Old English, mete meant 'food', but during the 1300s a "semantic narrowing" began, which lead to the meaning which we still use today. (The same has happened with the English word ‘deer’, which once referred to any animal, like the Swedish cognate djur.)

The older meaning does survive in the compound 'sweetmeat', which can be used about any sweet food. But as this word is becoming less and less common, it is easily reinterpreted, as in brand names like Sweet Meat Jerky, or in German artist Jasmin Schuller's literal and somewhat stomach-churning interpretation.

Next up is e, and what word could that be? Eggelsemedel 'aphrodisiac', stelbenthet 'rigidity', or helveteseld 'hell-fire'? We'll see!

The body and its parts

The body seems so universal and unchanging that there could be no room for changes in semantics and naming. E.g. Swedish hand, finger, fot, and arm are all similar to their equivalents in English, and there are plenty of less easily identifiable cognates, like öra ‘ear’ or huvud ‘head’.

But once you go into more detail, differences are quite easy to find. I will go through three of them here.

1. nacke and ‘neck’

English ‘neck’ refers to the entire part that is holding up one's head, while Swedish nacke is the equivalent of English ‘nape of the neck’. As usual, English is the odd one out in the greater Germanic context. The common division is to have one word similar to nacke referring to the nape of the neck, and one word similar to hals referring for the entire neck. Swedish has hals/nacke, German has Hals/Nacken, Danish has hals/nakke etc. The word ‘hals’ disappeared from English a long time ago, and the word ‘neck’ expanded its meaning, forcing speakers to create the additional expression ‘nape of the neck’.

Swedish hals furthermore refers both to the neck and the throat. If you talk about the outside you say på halsen lit. ‘on the neck’, and the inside is i halsen lit. ‘in the neck’.

2. vrist and ‘wrist’

Two clear cognates here, but Swedish vrist means ‘ankle’ or ‘instep’! This is due to the fact that the origin of both words simply meant something like ‘that which turns (the hand/foot)’, cf. the sort of turning in the related word ‘writhe’ and ‘wring’, and Swedish vrida ‘to turn’. English narrowed the meaning of this word to refer only to that which turns the hand, and Swedish did the same, but for the foot.

So what is the Swedish word for ‘wrist’? It’s handled, lit. ‘hand-joint’.

3. nos and ‘nose’

Again, two clear cognates. The big difference is that Swedish nos only refers to certain animal noses, while a human nose is normally näsa. But there is also the endearing term sötnos meaning ‘sweetie’, ‘honey’, which is literally ‘sweet-nose’.

Indeed, and one interesting thing is that the etymology is very similar too. "Chez" comes from "casa"! http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/chez

This reminds me a lot of the “chez” construction in French. Most of you probably know it referring to someone’s home (or a fancy restaurant) but it can also be used in phrases where it can translate as “among,” such as when “Lactose intolerance is more common among Asians” is translated as “L’intolerance au lactose est plus courant chez les Asiatiques.”

The word #13: hos

The Northern Germanic languages all share a handy preposition meaning something like ‘at the home/place of’. In Swedish, this preposition is hos, pronounced [hʊs]. Examples:

Ska vi ses hos dig? – ‘Shall we meet at your place?’ (lit. ‘ ... at-the-home-of you’)

Hemma hos mig. – ‘Back at my place.’ (lit. ‘Home at-the-home-of me’)

This word looks suspiciously similar to hus [hʉːs] ‘house’, and there is a connection. The everyday noun hus has undergone a well-known process called ‘grammaticalization’ and has multiplied into a preposition. English is also rife with examples of this, e.g. ‘going to’. Once, it simply meant ‘going to (do something)’, as in:

[I'm going] [(in order) to eat].

Over time, speakers of English ‘reanalyzed’ the whole construction and begun to interpret it as a marker of future action, so today it is perhaps better described as

I'm [going to] [eat].

Once a word or phrase is ‘reanalyzed’ in this way, its pronunciation is usually reduced. ‘Going to’ is often reduced to ‘gonna’, which shows that this usage of ‘going to’ has taken on a different role than the literal meaning: when you say ‘I’m going to the kitchen’ you cannot use gonna’.

We see the same thing happening with hus [hʉːs] and hos [hʊs] in Swedish. The original meaning of ‘house’ or ‘place’ has also eroded, and today hos may be used in abstract and seemingly contradictory situations like

de relativa atompositionerna hos atomerna i en molekyl – ‘the relative positions of the atoms in a molecule’

på besök hos hemlösa ungdomar – ‘on a visit to homeless youths’

Grammaticalization shows that abstract notions can be created from very concrete building blocks like ‘go’ and ‘house’, and I recommend anyone interested in language change and language history to read more about it.

The verb ending -s #3: “Deponent”

I have already posted twice about how the Swedish verb ending -s can be used to express passive voice and reciprocal action, so now I want to wrap it all up with the third (and fourth) one:

The term “deponent” is not familiar to most people, but it is used about verbs in e.g. Latin which, for various historical reasons, are passive in form (i.e. have passive verb endings) but active in their meaning. The same exists in Swedish, and some examples of this are hoppas ‘to hope’, andas ‘to breathe’, kräkas ‘to vomit’, and låtsas ‘to pretend’. Their meaning is clearly active, but their form is the same as that of passive verbs. #4: Progressive -s You might think that three distinct uses of the miniscule ending -s would be more than enough, but there is even a fourth one. I am not giving it its own post, since it does not really add anything to the existing form, and using it is considered “bad language”.

-s can be attached to the progressive verb ending -ande/-ende (which is similar to, but used much less than, English -ing). The correct use would be e.g. hon kom gående nerför gatan ‘she came walking down the street’, and the incorrect use is then simply hon kom gåendes nerför gatan.

The verb ending -s #2: Reciprocal

In the first post about this verb ending, I looked at how -s can be used to form the passive voice of verbs.

Another common function for -s is to make verbs ‘reciprocal’. This term is used about verbs whose meaning require two or more people taking part, e.g. ‘to fight’, ‘to hug’, or ‘to kiss’. In English, such verbs can often be followed by the pronoun ‘each other’ if you want to emphasize the verb’s ‘reciprocality’. (Of course, you can also add ‘each other’ to make a regular verb reciprocal, cf. ‘they looked at the moon’ and ‘they looked at each other’.)

In Swedish, the pronoun varandra serves a similar function, as in de kramade varandra ‘they hugged each other’ and de tittade på varandra ‘they looked at each other’. But, there’s also ‘the -s method’:

de kramades/kysstes/träffades ‘they hugged/kissed/met’

While the passive -s can be added to practically any transitive verb, the reciprocal -s is ‘lexical’, meaning that it can only be used together with certain words, in this case a number of verbs which describe a reciprocal action. (But not all of them. For example, hångla ‘to french kiss’ never takes the reciprocal -s.) If you add -s to a verb which doesn’t meet these criteria, it will be interpreted as a passive -s.

This ending sometimes carries over to loan words, so just like the ancient Swedish verbs brottas ‘to wrestle’ and slåss ‘to fight’, the newer loans ‘to box’ and ‘to fight’ from English can have reciprocal -s too: boxas och fajtas (yep, that’s how you spell it in Swedish.)

Finally, is there a difference in meaning between -s and varandra, the two ways of marking reciprocality? For one thing, they are mutually excluding; if you use one you cannot use the other. There is, in my intuition, also a difference in duration: de slog varandra could mean that each person threw just one punch at the other, while de slogs indicates a longer brawl.

The verb ending -s #1: Passive

Swedish verbs, like English ones, don’t come in many forms. There’s the infinitive and the past, present, and perfect tense, and finally the progressive. Unlike English, neither of the Swedish forms have any inflection for person.

All of these forms may, however, be expanded with the ending -s, which serves several functions in Swedish. In this post, I will briefly describe the passive voice.

In English, the passive voice is formed with an auxiliary verb: ‘she was seen’, ‘the house was built’ etc. The Swedish translations would be hon sågs and huset byggdes. Swedish can use an auxiliary verb bli in most of these situations, but the simple ending -s is more common and very productive.

There are some set phrases using the passive -s: finnas is literally ‘is found’, but it is also the most common way to express existence:

Det finns filtar i sovrummet. There are blankets in the bedroom.

Var finns mjölken? Where is the milk?

Another expression is det märks att, literally ‘it is noticed that’. This is one way to say ‘you can tell that …’, e.g.

Det märks att han övat länge. You can tell that he has practiced for a long time.

The ending -s was originally an indepedent word; the Old Norse pronoun sik ‘oneself’, but over time, it fused with the verb. The older ending -sk is still found in English ‘bask’, a contracted form of Old Norse baðask, meaning ‘to bathe oneself’.

More functions of -s will follow soon!

Adjectives into verbs, the -na method

We’ve looked at two methods of turning an adjective ‘X’ into a verb meaning ‘to make sth X’. There was the method of adding -göra to the adjective, and of changing the adjective’s vowel, known as umlaut. Now for the third method: adding -na to the adjective. The equivalent ending ‘-en’ in English is very similar, but there is (of course) one clear difference. First some examples in Swedish with English translation:

hård ‘hard’ > hårdna ‘harden’

kall ‘cold’ > kallna ‘get cold’

mörk ‘dark’ > mörkna ‘darken’

Just like the two methods described earlier, the process of adding -na to an adjective is “unproductive”. (This means that there is only a set number of existing verbs like this, and you cannot create new verbs by adding -na to any adjective.) Before we look at the difference between Swedish and English, it’s worth pointing out that the meanings of these verbs are very similar in Swedish and English. They mostly refer to very concrete properties of something, e.g. color, light, density, size, and shape. Some other examples in English are ‘flatten’, ‘broaden’, ‘ripen’ (often indicated by a change in color, texture, and feel), ‘straighten’, and ‘soften’. Now for the difference: in English, a verb like ‘harden’ can be used both when something hardens by itself – ‘the cement hardened’ – and when someone consciously hardens something – ‘she hardened the steel’. The same goes for ‘loosen’; a knot can loosen by itself, or someone can actively loosen it. In Swedish, you can only use -na verbs for the first kind of construction, while the second one uses another verb:

Adjective: hård

‘The cement hardened.’ – Cementen hårdnade.

‘She hardened the steel.’ – Hon härdade stålet.

Adjective: kall

‘The food is getting cold.’ – Maten kallnar.

‘You can cool the burn with some ice.’ – Du kan kyla brännsåret med lite is.

Adjective: fast

‘The lever is stuck.’ – Spaken har fastnat.

‘I will attach the cable here.’ – Jag ska fästa kabeln här.

The first sentence in each pair above is called ‘intransitive’, which means that the verb has no object, only a subject; the cement, the food, and the lever, respectively. The verb in the second sentences is ‘transitive’, i.e. having an object (underlined): ‘She hardened the steel’, ‘You can cool the burn’, ‘I will attach the cable’. As you may have registered, the Swedish transitive verbs above are umlaut verbs (härda, kyla, fästa), but this is not always the case. For instance, the transitive version of lossna ‘to come loose’ is lossa. Finally, a peculiar incongruity between the two languages. ‘Redden’ means ‘to turn (sth) red’, but the Swedish equivalent rodna only means the same in a very specific situation: it means ‘to blush’!

The word #12: åhörarbänk

First of all, åhörarbänk ‘audience seat’ contains all of the three letter å, ä, and ö. Other examples are köttfärssås ‘minced meat sauce’, räksmörgås ‘shrimp sandwich’, and återförsäkra ‘reinsure’.

This fact in itself is interesting enough to some people, but åhörarbänk contains another interesting thing. First, let’s take it apart: å is ‘on’, hörare is ‘hearer’, and bänk is ‘bench’. Pretty straight-forward. But, if you know some basic Swedish you will have learnt that the word for ‘on’ is usually på. What’s this å? The truth is that på has not always been på. It used to be å, as we can still see in certain words and idioms:

å ena sidan … å andra sidan – ‘on the one hand … on the other hand’

å mina vägnar – ‘on my behalf’

åsidosätta – ‘disregard, neglect’ (lit. ‘on-side-put’)

åsyfta – ‘intend, mean’ (lit. ‘on-refer’)

Where did this p come from then? It came from the spatial adverb upp ‘up’ in the compound preposition upp-å, equivalent to English ‘upon’. Through the grinding effect of language change, these two words merged into one: på. This newcomer then took over and å only survived in a few constructions. For example, you say höra på ‘listen to’ (lit. ‘hear on’) but åhörare ‘listener’ (lit. ‘on-hearer’).

A similar thing has happened in some English-based Caribbean creoles, where ‘upon’ has been shortened to ‘pon’. In Linton Kwesi Johnson’s dub poem ‘Sonny’s Lettah’, written in Jamaican creole, Sonny tells his mother what the police did to his friend Jim:

Dem lick 'im pon 'im back and 'im rib get pop Dem thump him pon him head but it tough like lead

A more recent example is the Barbadian Rihanna’s ‘Pon de Replay’.

The word #11: hemlig

The adjective hemlig consists of the noun hem ‘home’ and the derivational suffix -lig, similar to ‘-ly’. Ergo, the same construction as English ‘homely’. Do hemlig and ‘homely’ mean the same thing? Of course not! The English ‘homely’ balances between ‘unpretentious and simple’ and ‘unattractive’, somewhat the essence of a home: it might not look much to the outside world, but it’s your home; you know it and you feel comfortable in it.

Swedish hemlig has taken another turn, meaning ‘secret’. The idea here is that what takes place in the home is hidden from outside view. It’s private and not for everyone else to see. A similar idea about the home might exist for English-speakers, but this idea is not implied in the word ‘homely’. (German ‘heimlich’ interestingly means both ‘secret, clandestine’ and ‘familiar’, as Sigmund Freud notes.) The Swedish noun ‘secret’ is hemlighet, a derivation from hemlig, whose morphological equivalent in English would be the nonexistent ‘homelyhood’.

Another adjective based on hem is hemsk, corresponding to English ‘homeish’ (and to German ‘heimisch’, meaning ‘domestic, native’). Now it gets even worse, as hemsk means ‘horrible’! It used to mean ‘dull, slow-witted’, i.e. a person who spent too much time at home. Nowadays, it can even be used as an intensifier: hemskt långsam ‘terribly slow’, hemskt god ‘terribly good/tasty’.

So, although most Swedes would say they enjoy being at home, and many spend a lot of money making their home look perfect, there is an uncanny feeling lurking in the grammar …

The word #10: banta

Today, the verb banta ‘to diet’ is almost unique to Swedish, although it was borrowed from English just over a century ago!

This word is an “eponym”: a word coined after a person’s name. The person is question was the Brit William Banting (1797-1878), who lost a lot of weight through a diet low on carbohydrates. In 1863 he wrote a booklet about it: ‘Letter on Corpulence Addressed to the Public’. For a while his method was very popular, spreading all the way to Sweden, and the verb ‘to bant’ did have a short stint in English.

Since then, however, the verb ‘to diet’ has taken over as the usual English word meaning ‘regulating your consumtion in order to lose weight’, but in Swedish, Mr. Banting’s name has been immortalized through two words: the verb att banta and the noun bantning, with an n added to make the word fit the Swedish system better.

(You can read more about Mr. Banting and his method here in English, or here in Swedish.)

Farmor and systerson: Swedish words for family

Words for family members are often among the first words we learn, and although these words are really just regular nouns many of us never address our grandparents – or even our parents! – by their given name, but by these words.

When anthropologists and linguists talk about “words for family” they usually call them ‘kinship terms’, and kinship systems can vary a lot between languages and cultures. In some languages, e.g. Indonesian, there is no lexical distinction between ‘sister’ and ‘brother’, but instead a dinstinction between ‘older sibling’ and ‘younger sibling’. (And don’t get me started on the systems of some of the Australian aboriginal people! PDF, 152 kb)

Now, time for Swedish. Despite some missing syllables, most of the basic Swedish kinship terms are easily recognizable for an English-speaker: bror, syster, far, and mor. But, unlike English, most other Swedish kinship terms are formed through a simple system of compounds (yay!). First, some basic examples:

farfar ‘paternal grandfather’, lit. ‘father-father’

farmor ‘paternal grandmother’, lit. ‘father-mother’ (Together, these are farföräldrar, lit. ‘father-parents’)

morfar ‘maternal grandfather’, lit. ‘mother-father’

mormor ‘maternal grandmother’, lit. ‘mother-mother’ (Together, these are morföräldrar, lit. ‘mother-parents’)

This entails that there’s no easy way to say ‘grandparents’ in Swedish. You have to say mina mor- och farföräldrar, lit. ‘my mother- and father-parents’.

The same system applies for uncles and aunts. You differentiate between farbror ‘father-brother’ and morbror, and between faster and moster (I will leave out the literal translations. You get the system by now).

It also works in the opposite direction. A grandmother can talk about her sonson, dotterson, dotterdotter, or sondotter. However, it’s just as common to talk about one’s barnbarn, lit. ‘children-children’, when referring to one or more grandchildren.

Nor are there any commonly used words for ‘niece’ or ‘nephew’. They are brorson, brorsdotter, systerson, and systerdotter. These can be lumped together, but not by the gender of the child, as in English, but usually by the gender of their parent: systerbarn and brorsbarn.

Finally, the word syskon ‘sibling’ is more common in Swedish than in English. If you want to inquire about the fertility of someone’s parents, you ask Hur många syskon har du? ‘How many siblings do you have?’. (This word also allows lumping together nieces and nephews in the term syskonbarn.)