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- "Vad hade du ätit då?"
5 Comments
jacob738094
597
I find it really that in both English and Swedish this sentence is ambiguous, why should two seemingly unrelated words be the same in both languages?
They're actually cognate. The Germanic root had a þ sound at the start, like English still does, but other languages like Swedish changed it to a d. In Scandinavia, the n at the end was eventually dropped, and the vowel changed.
You can practically see the evolution if you go through northern Europe:
- Swedish: då
- Danish: da
- German: dann
- Dutch: dan
- English: then