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Arbetar sounds alot like the German word, "arbiten" I'm not sure if that's spelled correctly they both of these words mean working, is working, works, or work.
Yes, the Swedish word was borrowed from Low German some 600 years ago.
This spescific word might come from German, but the vast majority of the Swedish language comes from Old Norse - which is a Germanic language by itself, so it is natural that there are many words in Swedish that remind their German equivalents (and also the English ones, such as Bok=book, Syster=sister, Hus=house etc...)
Yep. And with English, on top of the shared ancestry, there's also tons of borrowings from the Vikings coming over in the 9th century
In Dutch we replaced this verb by "werken", which is more like "to work" in English. But if you use compositions like "work insurance", it's "arbeidsverzekering"
fun fact: the Japanese word for a part time job is アルバイト, which is a direct transliteration of the same German word that gave Swedish arbetar. I love it when words in such vastly different languages have the same etymological roots.
Is "jag" more often pronounced like "ya" rather than "yog?" The fast and slow versions of this sentence sound different from one another.
In German, "Dienst" is a worker in Government (the departments and the army) "Arbeit" means the others.
I wonder if Swedish has the same thing as I've mentioned above.
That make sense. Dienen in German means "to serve" - so (correct me if I'm wrong) Dienst is used for Government because it implies that the worker is a civil "servant."
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The worker in a government department might be called a "tjänsteman", coming from "tjänst", which has the same history as German "Dienst".
