21 Comments
"...but it pours!" Stockholm's archipelago, a home-from-home for an Englishman!
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That's a possible word order, but it's pretty rare. We'd usually just use stress for emphasis.
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The verb must go in second place in the sentence, so that doesn't work. The word order here is neutral.
can someone say something about the etymology of 'aldrig'? I'd love to have a mnemonic that isn't "the opposite of English ALways and Dutch ALtijd" :-)
It sounds like "all day" if you drop the "r", which is close enough to the opposite of "never".
Thanks- I was looking for an etymology that would actually NOT be the opposite:-) At least the actual Swedish 'always' is closer to the Dutch than this. But there is a long tradition of this: Latin 'lucus a non lucendo' "forest, from there NOT being light there"..
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Wiktionary says it comes from an older construction ne aldri-gi in Old Swedish meaning not in any time where ne is a negating particle and aldri means 'time', 'age', and -gi is some other particle.
Cool - thank you! Teaches me, too, that I could be looking things up myself:-) Am still having a hard time making the connection with the other Germanic languages (though you can see Gm. Alter, Sw. ålder in there, and I had mistakenly associated it with the 'all' root. Edited to add: No, actually, I can't read wiktionary Swedish entries yet! So thank you again.
The English Wikitionary states these cognates from other Germanic languages: "Icelandic aldrei, Norwegian aldri and Danish aldrig"
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You've visited Borås? Anyway, we have this rule called the V2 which demands that the verb must go in second place in most sentences (in main clauses that are not questions). So it must be Det regnar alltid i Sverige.
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It's cool that you've even heard of the place at all. It's a town (wikipedia calls it 'city', but I think that's a bit too generous) in Western Sweden that has the reputation of being the rainiest place in Sweden. It has also been voted 'most boring town/city' :D
