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- "Han vil gerne være sygepleje…
17 Comments
69
Whether or not is has a good linguistic basis, this is how I'm going to remember it now. Nice catch.
1110
So in the hover over, it says that sygeplejer is male. I know there's another word for a female nurse, which I can't remember off the top of my head right now, but can this word also be used for a female nurse?
Actually that 'sygeplejer' is male is kinda right, but mostly wrong.
In the olden days 'sygeplejer' refereed to a male, and 'sygeplejerske' to a female performing the same job. Danish used to do this with a lot of words, just like German still do, but for this one both words stuck.
In modern Danish though they are actually two different jobs. 'sygeplejerske', the female form, is actually a job requiring a higher education then a 'sygeplejer', the male form.
In even more modern times, since 1991, the education for 'sygeplejer' no longer exist and has been replaced by 'social- og sundhedsuddannelserne'.
Therefore 'sygeplejerske' is definitely a correct translation and, I would argue, the only correct translation. Also if you look up 'nurse' in a English to Danish dictionary you find only 'sygeplejerske'. https://www.ordbogen.com/opslag.php?dict=a000&word=nurse
2123
In other words, maybe the sygeplejer is now more like what we often call a nurse's aide in the US?