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- Topic: Swedish >
- "Torsdag kommer före fredag."
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Is Torsdag a Thor's day? I mean the thunder throwing guy? Or is there some other etymology here?
Sun day, moon day, Tyr's day, Odin's day, Thor's day, Frigg's day, and bathing day
As a bit of cultural fact, week starts on Monday in Sweden (like in most of Europe).
I believe "Wednesday" came from Wotansday, as the Germanic equivalent of Odin.
Lördag is supposed to be bathing day ? I assumed it was something like Lord's day,that's how i memorized it,the rest of them made much more sense
Lördag comes from the old fashioned verb löga meaning to bath. Lögardagen became lördag.
Ohh,i've been trying to get to it using google translate,didn't get anything by trying to translate lör/a .Nice to know,always nice to associate new knowledge with something so as to help remember it
That happens in English as well! The names of the days are really related for what I've seen, except Saturday/, they come from the same gods/sun/moon stuff but as the Old English name was different, the names of the days evolved differently too.
I meant that Saturday/lördag is the only name without a common root in both languages ^^
I know. I never once doubted that. I simply desired to state a tidbit of information I felt had been left out.
When is 'innan' used and when is 'före' used? (or am I remembering wrongly that 'innan' also means 'before'?)
Traditionally in grammars you will read that innan is a conjunction and före is a preposition. That means that you’d use innan to introduce a subordinate clause and före if you had an object afterwards, e.g.
- Vi kommer innan du åker. (We will come before you leave.)
- Vi kommer före resan. (We will come before the trip.)
However, nowadays it’s equally accepted to use innan as in the second example, as a preposition, but you cannot use före to introduce subordinate clauses, except for some Finland-Swedish dialects as far as I know.
- Vi kommer innan/före resan.
So in this example, traditionally only före would have been accepted, but nowadays you can use either före or innan.
Here, have a lingot. Just for mentioning Henning Mankell. * drowns in nostalgia *
Thank you for the explanation! I was wondering, why are we not inverting noun-verb after innan?
I thought that the clause after innan would be a dependant clause. In the Tips&Notes for "Conjunctions", the inversion is present in "Jag vill äta glass men det vill inte du" and I don't get why if men is just there to conjunct two main clauses.
I have had a look in my very old Svensk språklära and I think the word order is inverted because det is first in the clause. One can also say. Jag vill äta glass, men du vill inte det. Inverted word order is used when there is a question, negation or condition, in most exemples I can think of. I can not think of a sentence like that starting with innan. Hope that is of some help.
What if you only have a personal noun after före? Something like: "Vi kommer före dig." like we are going to come before you. Is it acceptable to use före in this case?
Also, this is completely separate question, "we will come" is a future tense. How come is written like a present tense "vi kommer"?
Tack
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Tack så mycket for your clear explanation on "innan'' and "före" . Could you please also add how to use "förut" correctly?
Förut is before in the meaning of previously. Det är ett ord jag aldrig förut tänkt på. Det gjorde jag förut, men nu gör jag inte det. Jag har sett henne förut. Hope that makes sense.
This made sense until I saw this today-Jag går inte förrän du kommer- in voice exercise.... Is förrän used because the first clause is a negative?
Yes, that is correct - förrän is only ever used with a negation. It's the "until" in "not until", so to speak.
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You have definitely typed out a thorough and complete answer, however I'm still totally confused. I don't see any difference in your examples. They both seem to be exactly the same. Is there a different way you can try to explain it? I'm clearly too dumb to understand the nuance.
Hey, don't berate yourself! We all struggle with different things in our learning.
What he's saying is that you use före with nouns, and innan with verbs.
However, in modern colloquial Swedish, it's very common to use innan with both verbs and nouns (but still före only with nouns).
in spoken swedish is the "g" pronounced or silent with the days of the week? I know the TTS pronounces it but I've heard most people treat it as silent if I'm not mistaken.
Yes you are right and in everyday speech I would say 'torsdan' rather than torsdagen
Is it just me, or does the speaker sound like she's saying "freRdag"? Is that how it's actually pronounced?
I hear that, too, but I think it is how they pronounce their long "e" sound. When they say "te" it sounds like "tee ah". In English we write "tea" but never say the "a". So with fredag it sounds like "Free ah". I remember the Swedish long "e" sound by thinking of English words like "read" and "eat". Swedes are actually saying "ee ah" when they say their long "e" which almost sounds like they are adding an extra vowel. Anyway this is how I remember it.
