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- "Där sover jag."
45 Comments
Why is this word order used here? Shouldn't it be 'Jag sover där' or 'Där jag sover'? There's no question, yet verb comes before 'jag'. Why?
Swedish can sometimes move things to the beginning of the sentence for emphasis. And because of the V2 rule (verb second), it then has to be "Där sover jag". The sentence "Jag sover där" contains exactly the same info, and is just as accepted as an answer here. The sentence "Där jag sover" is not accepted as a translation here due to the V2 rule.
Sounds a bit ... poetic, dramatic, no doubt because it is a slightly archaic word order, revealing Germanic roots.
Fairly common in English where the focus is on the "there". -- He moved to London in 1975 and there he lives still.
That doesnt sound right to me - "and he still lives there" seems much more likely.
You are correct, Simon. If someone said "....and there he lives still, the listener would assume that English is not the speaker's first language.
Late to the party but a better example might be something like, "There you are!" The emphasis is on the location in order to imply that you've already looked for the person in other places.
English is my native language and I have never heard anyone say anything like "Here we make our stand" or "There you will stay." It's possible that such unusual statements might be found in literature, but definitely not in spoken English,
Such forms are relatively common in older poetry, and to a lesser extent in literature.
A handful of fixed phrases using this structure have also survived into modern times (‘Here be dragons.’, ‘Here lies .’, etc), and there are a couple of idiomatic phrases in some dialects that use it as well (‘Here we are.’, ‘There you go.’, etc).
However, it is indeed pretty uncommon in spoken English vernacular.
"there is where I sleep" gives the same emphasis but isn't accepted as correct
You would typically say That's where I sleep' instead of 'I sleep there' though.
1230
Där is a position e.g. we live there. Dit is a direction e.g. we go over there
Or as the examples that I found online:
Jag bor där. (I live there.)
Anna sitter i rummet där borta. (Anna is sitting in the room over there.)
Vi måste åka dit nu. (We have to go there now.)
Kan du köra honom dit? (Can you drive him here?)
Sorry, the V2 rule? I thought adverbs are always placed after the verb, according to the Tips & Notes.
They will often be, but adverbs are a tricky bunch. When it is moved to the beginning of the sentence for emphasis like this case, the V2 rule applies.
It's "Var som helst". "Där som helst" does not exist. (that would mean "therever" which makes no sense either, hehe)
So can you add "som helst" to any question word, such as "när som helst, vem som helst, vad som helst, hur som helst, vilken som helst" meaning "whenever, whoever, whatever, however, whichever" respectively? Also, if so, does "vad som helst" have the same meaning as English "whatever" when, for example, a rebellious teen dismisses your question and "hur som helst" as English "however", synonym for "though"?
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Almost. Som helst can't be used with varför.
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No, it's not used dismissively like English "whatever"
What would be the equivalent of that sense of whatever, in swedish? (The dismissive sense, I mean.)
I don't know. Perhaps "jag bryr mig inte", meaning "I don't care". Or "det skiter jag i" meaning "I don't give a crap". :p
Would the difference in sentence position be similar to the difference between "I sleep there" and "That's where I sleep?"
- 1453
No, that would be 'där jag sover' in Swedish (and not a complete sentence in either language).
This is a super weird sentence. Like are we having an out of body experience?
Simon518062 wrote that "He moved to London in 1975 and there he lives still" doesn't sound right to him, "...and he still lives there" being much more likely.
And so it is. My point was that, even so, the word order I used is by no means uncommon, especially in telling a tale, and where the focus is on the word "there". You have to hear the "tune" of "and THERE he lives STILL".
He settled at last on the island of Mull, and there he lives still, with his wife and his daughter, six geese, and a goat.
Wrong tense - the Swedish is in the present, which corresponds in this case to habitual in English.
It's like the German grammar:
Da schlafe ich Där sover jag
In English this isn't possible it would literally be:
There I sleep But meaning I sleep there.
Actually, it's entirely possible with English grammar, it's just anti-idiomatic. You can find this structure in poetry and in some cases where the speaker is trying to sound archaic (or alternatively, trying to sound like they don't speak English very well).
This case does, however, sound very odd to a native speaker. It's not unusual to see this structure with either a present continuous tense verb ('There it remains.', 'Here he lies.'), or with a first person pronoun ('There I slept.'), but the combination of both is vanishingly rare in modern English, even within poetry, as it kind of implies some form of external observation of oneself.
- 329
Good advice with swedish... if you know german, that is. What would the german say.... mind you, I get it wrong sometimes anyway. I have to learn via english, so I deal with 3 languages at the same time. But yeah, often it helps to think "Wait, what would I say in german" and discard the english structure...
I actually answered myself xD, I got confused because "där" sounds a lot like the other wh-questions, ursäkta
