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- "De använder sina strumpor."
44 Comments
This is a weird one. "They are using their socks...." "to mop up the floor"? "to keep their hands warm"? "as receptacles for Santa's goodies"? my big Hippocrene dictionary gives "wear" as specifically for kläder, glasögon etc as "wear", but DL rejects it.
Maybe they cut them up and put them in front of the TV-screen in order to watch in colour?
This statement may seem very random, but this is was an april fools joke in 1962 which got a lot of attention. More or less every Swede tried it according to what I've heard.
90
Hilarious! I came to the discussion figuring this might be a reference to something amusing. Some of the sentences on Duo are laugh-out-loud funny. I noticed this only after starting on Scandinavian languages. Now I can't help wondering how many references have gone completely over my head.
Well, Iwas just thinking axactly the same. I often end up laughing reading the comments. Or I come across links to eurovision entries which then stick in my head for the rest of the day
If I remember it correctly it was Lennart Hyland, a famous Swedish TV and radio celebrity back then.
thats hilarious! just watched this 1962 news episode and it indeed sounds very serious and truthful lol
- 1461
Yes, använder means use, not wear (that would be har på sig). You've already suggested three good possible contexts for this sentence. I guess an inventive person could think of a lot of uses for their socks.
Another use: they use their socks - and a bit of soap - to beat an army buddy
Did the trumpet player use his socks to muffle the sound when practicing?
I've been to Sweden for 2 weeks or so and saw a lot of Pippi Längstrumpa posters (not sure if I wrote it right
I found the show streaming and watched an episode. It was so fun! Although I never realized Pippi had magical powers!!
sina means the socks are their own; deras would mean they belong to some other people.
vända means to turn, I can't check but I'm guessing it's related to the English verb to "wind" something.
an was an adverb that turned into a prefix for certain verbs - it's fairly common.
So it's as if English had said "enturn" for "use", pretty much.
- 17
Can anyone show the pronunciation of this sentence in the international phonetic alphabet or in an approximation of it? "De använder sina" sounds totally incomprehensible to me. Thanks!
de använder sina strumpor
The most basic approximation, ignoring dialect, would be something like
/dɔm anvɛndɛr siːna strʉmpʊr/
However, the r in använder is usually silent, and it's very common to merge the r + s into a retroflex ʂ, even though they're part of different words:
/dɔm anvɛndɛ ʂiːna strʉmpʊr/
Also, a few vowels may differ by dialect, like the u in strumpor which can use either an /ɵ/ or an /ʉ/.
Hope that helps.
is använde the normal word or does it mean "employ"?
Cause the German anwenden means employ, not just use. Is there something relatede to "nutzen" in Swedish?
- 1461
använder is the normal translation for use. employ as in hire is anställa.
Other words with related meaning are använda sig av, utnyttja, nyttja, bruka. You can get a feel for the various uses of these by looking them up at ord.se
German anwenden is in many cases tillämpa in Swedish, which can also in many cases correspond to employ (but also very often apply). So none of the three languages really correspond 1=1 here.
I would never translate "anwenden" as "employ" (native German speaker). I would say "(make) use (of)"/"utilise", "deploy" or "apply" would be the best translations in 95% of the cases.
Employ (as in hire) would rather be "anstellen" (same in Swedish - anställa).
I think you are mistaking "anwenden" for "anstellen".
Employ originally means "to make use of", then figuratively (as in "make use of s.o.") it came to also mean "to hire". But its main sense is still to "give an application to something".
Anyway the main thing was to see how and if använder and anwenden resembled.
Okay, I never heard that employ was used as "make use of", didn't knew it also works for that.
Thank you it was really, really helpful! Since the day I first saw that both verbs meant "hire" I've been wondering if there was a nuance I was missing. Thank you for the clarification :)
Yes, in FR "employer" means to use, make use of something. I would think that "to employ" comes to EN from FR.
No problem, thanks for your suggestion. Btw if you don't mind my asking: what is the difference between anstellen and einstellen?
Well if you are talking about a job you can use both, so "jemanden anstellen"/"jemanden einstellen" translate to "hire someone". But they change their meaning if you put it in other context. "anstellen" can also mean "line up" (in a line of people). "etwas anstellen" means something like "to be up to do something" i.e.: "Wir müssen etwas anstellen" > "we have to do something." "Was hast du angestellt?" > "what did you do?" << this is used if someone does something wrong/bad, so when you broke a window and your Mom is angry ;)
On the other hand "etwas EINstellen" means "to stop something" or "set up something" "Feuer einstellen" > "Cease fire" (shooting) (not stop the campfire for example) "Könnten sie das Radio einstellen?" > "Could you set up the radio?"
So the words are really bound to the context to understand the meaning. As always in German :D
Is this the simplest and the most common word for "use"? Not "bruka" or something?
My translation was "They use his socks.", this was wrong. But sina means also his, so why this is wrong?
Reflexive pronouns always point back to a person you've already introduced. In this case, it's de. If you have de ... sina, then that's always going to be "they ... their".
Not talking about the weird sentence, but my accent is terrible. I'm french, the r are super hard to say
