"På midsommar lägger vi sju olika blommor under kudden."
Translation:On Midsummer we put seven different flowers under our pillows.
20 Comments
34
You are supposed to see your future husband or wife in a dream if you do this. There are all kinds of similar traditional 'spells' like this. If you look into a well during Midsummer night, for instance, you can see your future spouse.
- 197
It seems that Duo doesn't like "lay" for "lägger" (or at least, it rejected On midsummer we lay seven different flowers under the pillow and accepted On midsummer we put seven different flowers under the pillow). Is there a reason for that, or just a matter of a less-common wording not being added to the database?
- 234
Is kudden here acting as a reflexive possessive, …under our pillows, like how e.g. jag tappar telefonen is I drop my telephone? The current literal translation as …under the pillow is a bit unclear in English.
- 853
Yes, that's the most likely interpretation. It should probably be the main English version too since that makes more sense.
- 237
Not really, saying "under the pillows" makes perfect sense, you would assume its your own, you dont break in to your neighbours house to put flowers under their pillow
Does English need to have the plural pillows here? In my native dutch I could say "our pillow" and everyone would know I'm speaking of the pillows of each of us, and not 1 pillow we all share. That's why I struggle to give the right translation each time this sentence comes up ;)
- 197
To my ears at least, it sounds wrong to have "We (something) our pillow"- indeed, it sounds like there's one single pillow that we collectively own.
I agree - we do accept "the pillow", though, since that makes it more obvious that it's just pillows in general, each probably belonging to a separate person.
Technically two, but nobody cares about the second one, so just midsommar will just about always refer to only the first day. :)
- 221
The pronunciation of "midsommar" sounds unduly formal. It would normally be pronounced MISS-SOMMAR.
Yeah, it's a problem all over the course. If we could correct it, I'd be happy to.
