27 Comments
334
When you have a definite noun with an adjective, Swedish requires a standalone article (det/den/de) to be added before the adjective.
I'll take a shot at this. Hopefully I get it right.
bonde = farmer träd = tree And I'm guessing gård is the relation to a garden or area that something is grown in.
So a bondgård would be a farmer's land, e.g. farm, and trädgård would be related to your lawn, or the English version of a garden (as opposed to the American version of a garden).
I hope I got that right.
Some etymology: gård originally referred to an enclosed area of some kind, so the gård in bondgård was the area around the farm. But gård has acquired a lot of meanings, and became increasingly general in meaning. Thus, the trädgård is the tree-area and the bondgård is the farmer-area. There is also the word skärgård meaning "archipelago", but taken very literally it's the "skerry-yard".
Ah! Skerry is Scottish and yep it’s from Old Norse. Skerry-yard sounds lovely.
Midgard etc from the same root as gård I see.
Re-recording
The voice is not quite perfect on this sentence, as of May 10th, 2018, so I've taken the liberty of re-recording it.
Unless the farm belongs to James Bond, bondgårdarna has the incorrect pronunciation of the first vowel. :)
Please find a correct recording on http://duolingo.vydea.io/5c6beeb44ed647498cd24b435675d74f.mp3
For more info on re-recordings, please check the info thread: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/23723515
Thanks for listening. Ha en bra dag! :)
- 838
de is the plural of the article den/det (like 'the') here, not the pronoun de (like 'they').
- 334
Well, yes. "De" has two separate meanings: the pronoun "they" when it occupies the subject position in a sentence (de dricker vatten), and the article "the" when it precedes an adjective before a plural noun (de stora bondgårdarna).
- 838
It can't actually, since 'farmyards' aren't the same things as 'farms'. bondgård means just 'farm'. 'a farmyard' can be en gårdsplan and in the right context, en gård could also work.
A farmhouse is technically a mangårdsbyggnad, though the term isn't common in Swedish at all.
