"Jag bryr mig om dig."
Translation:I care about you.
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Can I change the "dig" in this sentence into something else, instead of a person or people? Is it idiomatic to say the following sentence if I want to say "I care about my health."?
Jag bryr mig om min hälsa.
The Dutch wiki suggests:
Afkomstig van het Nederduitse woord "brüden" (= plagen, lastig vallen, feitelijk: ontucht drijven met). [derived from the Low German word "brüden" (to plague, to bother, actually: to fornicate with)]
I can't confirm this exact verb but I suspect what they mean is the word I pronounce as "bröden". It is cognate to English "to breed" and "to brood" and can mean both. The Standard German cognate is "brüten" and has the same meaning as the Low German one.
In any case though, if that etymology is true, I would have thought that there should be an archaic form bryda, bryder. The past is indeed brydde (with an additional "d" which might come from an earlier bryd- stem. I can't find any sources to confirm it though, so take it with a grain of salt. Then again, even if it's ultimately false, it can still serve as a mnemonic aid I guess ;)
vård is a noun: hälsovård “health care”, sjukvård “medical care”, at vara i behov av vård “to be in need of care”. It’s not used as a verb.
bry just happens to be reflexive. There are such verbs, particularly when it comes to verbs that describe emotional reactions which can’t be controlled. Compare how in English you can “enjoy something”, but if there is no object you cannot just “enjoy”; instead you “enjoy yourself”.
Because att bry sig doesn’t refer to the action of “caring about” as in “to take care of”. It’s the mental disposition “to care about” as in “to take strong interest in the well-being of”.
So if jag bryr mig om dig, I’m not saying that I’m making food for you, making sure you are safe etc. It just means that your well-being is important to me.
Because bry is always used reflexively (at least in the sense we’re talking about): bry sig om någon/någott. Bry without a reflexive pronoun appears to exist in the sense of “to harass” (making bry sig om ngn./ngt literally “to harass oneself about sb./sth.”), but that usage appears to be uncommon today. These days the verb is mostly used in the idiom bry sig om.
Swedish has a couple of verbs which are always used with a reflexive pronoun (as do a lot of Indo-European languages actually, English is an odd one out for having any), bry sig om is one of them. So *Jag bryr om dig would be incorrect, you need mig.
Historically speaking this seems to be because bry used to mean “to trouble, to bother”, so bry sig om någon = “to trouble oneself about somebody”. But nowadays this verb is restricted to this specific expression and you can’t use it freely as *bry någon “to trouble somebody” anymore (though it appears that you still can in Norwegian).