Tag: Swedish

Sami people

There is the tendency in Finland to tell that Finland is for the Finns and they should therefore all talk Finnish. And they moreover tell that Swedes were conquerors (when they arrived 1000 years ago the “Finnish” shores) and implanted Swedish, and the Russians tried that (200 years ago), too.

With that background, I couldn’t but laugh for myself as I encountered a map like this in a book about the root of the Europeans.

Sami people in Northern Europe AD 0.
Sami people AD 0.

On the map areas 1 and 2 represent the Sami people around AD 0. Area 3 is area that the Sami inhabited during XIV and XV centuries.

And the area 2 is the area where the Finnish (first tribes, nowadays government) have pushed the Sami away. So with this background, the ongoing linguistic and cultural aggression towards the Sami, Swedish speaking Finns and other linguistic minorities can be seen as a continuum for what has gone on for more than 2 millenniums.

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The Finnish Verb Nauttia

The Finnish verb nauttia ‘to enjoy’ doesn’t have any equivalent among the closest language relatives.

The stem of this verb is an old Germanic loan, with a reconstructed word stem *nautijan- ‘to possess, to enjoy’. This stem is represented in today’s Swedish verb nöta ‘to spend’, with an older meaning ‘to enjoy’.

In written language the verb nauttia has been since the XVI century.

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Swedish in Finland

Finland, areas with predominantly Swedish speaking population
Swedish speaking areas in Finland

Swedish language is a Germanic language that is spoken in Sweden and in Finland. In Finland, the Swedish language is the second official language. Swedish is spoken on coastal areas in Finland.

There are four main variants of the Swedish in Finland as shown on the map. The spoken variations differ quite a lot from each other, but as a written language they are all the same. The written language is the same in Finland and in Sweden.

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So Many Books Got Lost!

A couple of years ago Verbix incorporated verb conjugation of many Swedish dialects. This work would never have been possible without books from the serie “Svenska landsmål och svenskt folkliv“. These books were acquired from the Åbo Akademi University in Finland.

More specifically the books were bought from the “Duplicate Centre” of Åbo Akademi.

The Duplicate Centre had acquired during the years of existance a lot of books as donations. In the first hand the collections featured Swedish litterature and science. And the duplicates were sold and the money was spent on aquiring more litterature to the University Library.

In 2009 the Duplicate Centre was closed and the books were moved to a cellar in a nearby manor — out of reach for anyone!

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The Swedish verb promota

The Swedish language keeps incorporating words from other languages, such as English for example.

Therefore it’s no surprise that the Swedish adopted the verb promota ‘to promote’, too. The new ‘Swedish’ verb appeared in the beginning of 1990’s. Like other new verbs in the Swedish language, this verb is fully regular.

The work promote originally comes from the Latin language from two separate words pro ‘forward’ and movere ‘to move’. And based on this Latin background, we find the Swedish verb promovera ‘to promote’

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Verb Conjugation

Verb conjugation is the central part of the sentence in most languages.

Verb conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection. Principal parts is sometimes the infinitive like “cantar” in Spanish, but it can also be verb theme like “skriva – skriver – skrev -skrivit” in Swedish.

In Spanish it’s enough to know the infinitive of a verb to get all the conjugated forms; in the case of regular verbs all the conjugated forms are formed with the same set of endings. Unfortunately there is a big amount of irregular verbs that don’t follow the regular verb conjugation patters.

As shown in the example above, in Swedish verb conjugation there’s a verb theme consisting of four verb forms. All Swedish verb forms are formed by applying the same set of endings to the theme. The theme itself must be memorized, because it contains information about irregularities, if any.

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