25 Comments
Dang it, I don't know what I was thinking about when I translated this into "Three elves showed up in the garden". Better luck next time!
945
It's a bit like English actually where dive is also (or can be) irregular: dove
English person here. The past of "dive" is regular, "dived". Where has "dove" come from? So is "dove" actually used anywhere in the world? I've never come acros it.
- 1483
The switch between strong verbs and weak verbs in English has been going on for a long time. The vast majority of them were strong verbs that became weak verbs, using the -ed ending. To dive, interestingly, which was a weak verb to begin with, began being conjugated as a strong verb, with the past tense dove, in the nineteenth century. It usually only takes a few decades for new grammatical forms to be accepted, so I imagine we can accept the nearly two centuries old dove as an option.
It's mainly a North American thing at this point. As a Canadian, my natural inclination is to use dove for the past tense and dived sounds wrong.
- 1483
I knew it had been used for over a century, but it may only ever have been used in North America.
Where I live in the U.S., we use "dove" a little more than "dived," but both are fairly common. (I actually thought "dived" was an error until just now, lol.)
So I'm little confused by the nomenclature here. What exactly is in a trädgård? Flowers? Vegetables? Grass? Landscaping? Trees?
The default translation is to "garden", which is North America (whose English Duo is based on) means a plot of land used either for flowers or small-scale food growing. I assume, since the default translation is not "yard", it does not refer to grass and trees and whatnot, which is what a yard usually is in North America. Many yards have gardens.
I would rather not assume though. Can someone define a trädgård please?
- 945
The description of garden in English Wikipedia maps quite well to the Swedish trädgård. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden
There's a word gård which is pretty tricky, it is sometimes the same as yard, but not always. The yard around your house can also be en tomt.
If you're speaking about a (small) plot of land specifically used to grow things, that is ett land or ett trädgårdsland. A flowerbed is en rabatt (or en blomsterrabatt).
If you own or rent a small plot of land and use all or some of it to grow things on, that is en odlingslott.
I wish there were a level 2 Swedish course that would go over these things :)
In British English, I think en odlingslott is "an allotment", but I don't think they have those in America.
- 1483
No, community garden is as close as we have, and that, of course, is communal.
- 1938
If you are refering to the Swedish word 'gården' it is not really a 'garden (trädgård)', but either a farm (including the usual nature around a farm), or a piece of land around a building block, i.e. in a town, which does not necessarily include any plants at all, it is just the closest surroundings.
- 945
Sort of. dök upp literally means 'dove up' so it's much the same idea. But dök upp in Swedish is probably a little more neutral than popped up in English. It's used very widely.
To me, a more literal translation would be: "Three moose showed up in the garden". Am I wrong to assume this?
