"Det är allvarligt."
Translation:It is serious.
January 3, 2015
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This discussion is locked.
var used to mean "true" a long time ago - it still does in e.g. contemporary German (wahr), and it's from a really old root which is the source of e.g. Latin veritas. The -ig is a standard adjectival suffix, with -t being the neuter form (and the adverbial suffix). And of course, all means "all".
So the original meaning was "absolutely true", and I don't think the change in meaning is that far of a stretch, though I don't know how it happened - just that it was centuries back. :)
I'm actually willing to bet that we have quite a few words in Swedish with rather different meanings from each other, all of which are ultimately derived from var somehow.