"Älgen sover i natt."
Translation:The moose is sleeping tonight.
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There is actually a Swedish translation of the song! It goes:
Mitt i djungeln, den stora djungeln
Där sover lejonen
Which is easy to change to moose just going for "skogen" and "älgarna" instead. :D
And by the way, forests aren't really considered mighty in Swedish. Mäktig is used with actual power or sometimes with very rich desserts. :)
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Skog is the general word for forests in North Germanic languages (from Old Norse skógr, therefore a Proto-Germanic skōgaz), and is related to words like 'shag' for carpets and 'shaggy' for beards (from Old English 'sceacga'). However the Norse word was also borrowed into Old English as 'sceaga', which became modern 'shaw', notice the double consonants in 'sceacga' compared with 'sceaga', which preserve the hardened -g sound.
Skóggang means forest-passage (like Jünger's Waldgang), and Skógamaðr means man of forests (-a is possessive plural).
It wouldn't be every present-tense sentence though, right? It would only be the ones that also specify a time in the future.
I mean, is there a distinction between "The moose sleeps tonight" and "The moose will sleep tonight", and this sentence can only mean one of them and not the other? If there is, I'd be curious to know what it is, since the sentence seems to fit the pattern of "will do" sentences as I described above. And if there is no such distinction, shouldn't both "sleeps" and "will sleep" be considered correct? If anything, "The moose will sleep tonight" sounds more normal to my American ear, and "The moose sleeps tonight" sounds like more of a dramatic/poetic way to say it, although both ways have essentially the same meaning.
Fair enough, you have a point. :) Still, I would only think this sentence was about the future if that has been made abundantly clear through context, and it would honestly sound a bit strange even then. That's what I mean about it making idiomatic sense. It's grammatical, for sure, but hardly a feasible interpretation.