"Ormen biter pojken."
Translation:The snake bites the boy.
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Correct. The original word is (w)orm, cognate to English wyrm (an archaic word for a dragon); the W sound in Scandinavian languages just vanished before back vowels like O a very, very long time ago (pre-Viking, even!).
Danish has been influenced by continental German, where a snake is of course a Schlange and a worm is a Wurm.
Was there anything before Vikings? I thought Vikings were past, present and future, hahahahaha :P
Yes, Wurm (or Lindwurm) also means dragon in German, and is part of the germanic folklore. For instance the word "Wurm" can be found in Wagner's Ring Cycle: "Wurmes Gestalt schuf sich der Wilde; in einer Höhle hütet er Alberichs Reif!"
We have legendary "worms" in Britain, like the Lambton Worm, that are basically dragons, sometimes with a snakey aspect.
Smooth snake (Hasselsnok), Huggorm (European Viper/Adder) and Grass Snake (Snok/Gotlandssnok). I assume only as common as in the UK, and I have only ever seen one snake in the wild in the UK.
Yeah, it's kind of rare to see them, unless perhaps you're the hiking kind of person. I only ever once saw a huggorm and that was because it was dead... They're usually very shy.
unlike Indiana Jones, I love snakes, am a hiking kind of person, and will be in Sweden this summer. Hopefully, I see some.
I've only ever seen a Grass snake twice and an Adder once, though I'm not sure is a smooth snake is the same as a slow worm (which I once saw in a group of 3)
Smooth snakes and slow worms are not the same. Smooth snake (Coronella austriaca) is a snake, and is called "hasselsnok" in Swedish. The Slow Worm (Anguis fragilis) is a limbless lizard (not a true snake) and is called "kopparödla" or "ormslå" in Swedish.
Is "orm" etymologically a part of "jORMungand", or is it just a coincidence?
I always get tripped up on this one, because I always think of verbs in the past tense. I have entered "The snake bit the boy" literally dozens of times. I'm about ready to smash my head into my desk over this }:
Maybe you already know, but the past tense would be bet in Swedish. So that would be Ormen bet pojken which would actually sound a little more similar.
Does swedish have a distinction between a venomous bite and a 'normal' one?
I suspect not, at least not without specifying the snake was venomous. Of course, even a bit from a non-venomous snake can be serious (any puncture wound is potentially bad news, and on top of that snakes tend to have rather fragile teeth, so it's not unusual depending on where and how they bite for fragments of the teeth to break off in the wound, which will then almost certainly end up infected if they aren't removed).
