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- Topic: Swedish >
- "I do not love you."
"I do not love you."
Translation:Jag älskar inte dig.
48 Comments
Even more heartbreaking because "inte" comes after "ä," so you'd expect "I love you"...
Swedish is a perfect language to give a person hope and then upset the person. "Jag älskar dig... inte"
It's also good for trolling. "Jag älskar, inte dig!" Meaning "I love, NOT YOU!"
This is pretty much legit for every language I know. But that's uncommon to use the denial after a person hears "I love you" (s)he loves you exactly but "inte", that's where Swedish ambushes.
I think this should imply we all need more patience when communicating with others: don't start assessing what a person means by their words until they finish their statement. Obviously that's easier said than done, but I wonder if this produces any measureable difference in the average mindset/patience of people who speak languages with this format, vs those that don't...
1337
With pronouns, both orders are possible. So you can say Jag älskar inte dig and Jag älskar dig inte. With nouns, you can only have the noun last Jag älskar inte Björn.
Jag älskar dig inte is a more neutral way of saying it. Jag älskar inte dig implies that I don't love you, but I do love someone else.
So this is quite similar to German: I liebe dich nicht -> Jag älskar dig inte (more neutral) I liebe nicht dich -> Jag älskar inte dig (I don't love you but somebody else) or did I misunderstand this?
- 1337
The thing is that the verb needs to be in the second place in all sentences (except questions and subclauses). This is why inte usually comes after the verb, but it doesn't have to be, it's just that we very rarely want to start the whole sentence with inte.
- 1337
I'm glad you appreciate it! I personally think the discussions are at least as important as the sentences. I'm learning a lot myself too.
When you said "but it doesn't have to be", did you mean "jag inte älskar dig" could be correct as a simple sentence? Or were you talking about subclauses where "inte" has to go before the verb? (as in "Jag sa att jag inte älskar dig")
I wrote "Jag inte älskar dig." & I was wrong....what would my sentence mean?
I'm not an expert, but I think directly translated it would mean something like "I not love you". You probably thought of "I don't love you", but I think this sentence structure (is that what it's called? I'm talking about the "don't" in the sentence) does not exist in Swedish or at least not in the way it is used in English. Again I'm not an expert in Swedish. I'm basing these assumptions on the fact that I know what the Swedish words in the sentence mean and that the Swedish sentence structure seems to be quite similar to the German (my native language) sentence structure. So, I hope I could help you.
- 1337
du is the subject form and dig is the object form, and the thing you love is the object.
In English they're the same for this word, but you have different forms eg. for I and me – you wouldn't say You don't love I.
The difference is whether it refers to one or multiple people.
Du/dig = singular you (thou/thee)
Ni/er = plural you (y'all)
"Gör" is more like to physically do something in Swedish whereas in english its just a placeholder that means nothing
I put 'du' instead of 'dig',, got it wrong...How can I tell which one to use?
It's similar to how you would choose between "he" (subject) and "him" (object) in English. "du" is the subject and "dig" is the object. When you get a sentence like "I do not love you", see what it would be with "he" or "him": "I do not love him", and then you'll know which "you" it is.
The slow pronunciation given by "ango" here is pretty clear: https://forvo.com/word/dig/#sv (very much like English "day" but a bit extra on the y sound)
- 1337
ej is a formal version of inte which is basically never used in speech, but often on signs.
About the word order, read under 1.2 here: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/8970470
