"A girl eats a sandwich."
Translation:En flicka äter en smörgås.
20 Comments
982
Yup! The ancestry of smorgasbord goes directly back to Swedish (guess you'd even call it a loan word?). The Swedish "smörgås" meaning sandwich, and the Swedish "bord" meaning table become combined to form the English word smorgasbord which generally means a large spread of food (typically on a wide table unsurprisingly).
Yes, it's not even a question of whether it's a loan word, it's 100% a loan word straight from Swedish. There are others, such as "ombudsman", and, although not exactly Swedish so much as Old Norse, "saga" - among many more.
- 982
Thanks for the info! It seemed obvious to call it a loan word, but I didn't know if the term had some stricter definition when it came to linguistics so I decided to convey my own uncertainty, lol
Don't you just love how the word "smörgås" looks? It's so beautiful with that ö and that å ^^ hahaha
You can’t find logic in the genders. They’re often arbitrary. In this case it’s because -gås means ”goose” and living things tend to be ”en”, but normally there is no logic.
I worte ett in place of en.. And the app said it was wrong.. Why i thought both mean one!
- 371
Both words mean one, but you can't use them randomly with nouns. You'll need to learn if it's en or ett for each noun.
To my english ear, both vowels in smögås sound almost identical. Anyone able to help distinguishing ö from å?
As very rough approximations, the ö in this word sounds like the vowel in "birth", and the å like the vowel in "boss".
- 371
... or (most likely depending on accent) å would be like the 'o' in "horse".
Using my own accent in Swedish and English the word "Smörgås" could almost be transcribed as "s-m-(h)er-gorse", as long as you stick to a Brittish accent where the 'r's in "her" and "gorse" don't make too much sound. Almost...
(Both vowels are long in "Smörgås" where I live, but there are variations between different parts of Sweden - some use short ö and lång å, some use lång ö and short å, and some use short versions for both.)
The pronunciation with two short vowels is actually overwhelmingly more common, that's why I use it as a main example.
- 371
Quite possible, yes. I don't really know, as I only hear that version when watching TV. My mother's relatives (southeast) use long-short and my father's relatives (living on some of the islands outside Gothenburg) use short-long.
