"Det är en sorts kaka."
Translation:It is a kind of cookie.
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This really is a false friend for everyone who knows German, as kaka roughly translates as doo doo.
It's the same in French (spelled "caca" though). I wouldn't order chokladkaka in Sweden. Not really tempting...
Same in Finnish, kakka. And since Finland's second official language is Swedish, I often have to see that in cookie packages lol.
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It seems like every language have this other meaning of the word "kaka" except the Swedes :D
We have the same, except we'd say kacka - short vowel, so zero risk of confusion for a native. It's not a very common word, though.
It's a genitive expression, just like a kind of in English, but we rarely use av for that kind of thing.
It has two uses. One would be like in this sentence, just like any word – to mean 'a kind of, a sort, a type', literally.
The other use is as a filler word, much like English like. 'He was, like, about the same age as me'
We use the latter one a lot and it's getting less and less slangy and more and more just normal colloquial language.
- 680
In the English here, it is 'cookie' that gets the genitive treatment (of cookie) rather than 'kind'. So I'm tempted to write '... en kakas sort.' Does that have any meaning in Swedish?
No, you can't say "en kakas sort", it doesn't work. Stick to "en sorts..." or "en/ett slags..."
- 680
Thank you, zmrzlina. As for jarretph, you are right of course. But notice that in the Swedish, it is 'sorts' that is modified into the genitive, not 'cookie'. But in the English, 'kind' is not similarly modified. Instead, 'cookie' gets modified to 'of cookie', which is rather like a genitive. So that was the reason for my question. (Compare 'the book of my father' and 'my father's book'. Similarly, compare 'a sort of cookie' to 'a cookie of sorts/a sort'.)
Ah ok. That kinda makes sense. I don't really know all the grammatical terms.
Not sure what you mean. In English we say "a kind of cookie" not "a cookie's kind".
So cookies and cakes are the same thing in Swedish? I got marked right for choosing cake!
Sort of. En kaka is the biscuit-y kind of cake, while en tårta is the more birthday cakey kind.
- 2110
There are two main types of "kaka" : "småkaka" which means "cookie" and "sockerkaka" or "mjuk kaka" which means "cake". When you use elaborate filling, icing, whipped cream and other decorations, you make it into a "tårta".
Ok I get it. In Canadian English though at least cake would always mean the birthday kind (tårta). There are of course different dialects so I understand why it was accepted.
Now that I think of it, both kaka and cake can of course also be the bready kind of cake. But yeah, I guess it's regional/dialectal what's cake.
British english is the same tårta is something You can slice and a biscuit is something hard flat and crunchy
Oh! So kaka isn't specific to cookies but biscuits (in a more general sense) rather. Is it?
Does the 'rts' in sorts sound like the english 'ch' in child? I once heard a native pronouncing the 'rds' in gårdshotellet similarly. Are there others?
When s has an r behind it, it usually takes the sh sound, yes even when separated by another consonant as in your examples.
Kaka means "cake" in Swedish, like in chokladkaka or morotskaka. No cookies in these cases
That's not true. Cookies are kakor, too. The word covers a broader span in Swedish than in English.
- 1776
Presently surrounded by some of the 5% of Finns who have Swedish as their first language, they tell me that kaka for them would never be biscuit/cookie. Kaka is cake, tårta is more elaborate, say cream-filled cake and småbröd is biscuit