So yesterday I was having lunch with my friend, Pär, who was telling me about a recent ice skating experience of his. (And when Swedes talk about ice skating, they dont mean in a rink, they go long distances across lakes and rivers.) He was saying that there werent many "vak", and then he was trying to figure out what that word was in English. So he starts describing how the word sort of means a hole in the ice, and asked me what we would call that. I thought about it, and I said, "I think we call it a hole in the ice." He was pretty confident that there was a specific term for this special type of hole in the ice (since they distinguish this special hole in swedish), so to prove me wrong, he texted Blake:
Pär: What do you call a whole in the ice?
C: A hole in the ice.
Pär: Come on. U have to have a word for it.
C: Yeah, 'a hole in the ice!'
And English is rich? :(
A few hours later, I got an email with this link: http://tyda.se/search?form=1&w=vak&w_lang=&x=0&y=0
Victory is mine!!!
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14 years ago
1 comment:
This is a rebuttal from Pär:
As a Swede you get brainwashed at school from a young age with (apparently) false propaganda about how poor a language Swedish is in comparison to English. I think most Swedes are (overly) proud of the (up until now) only known word we have that doesn’t have an equal in English, i.e. lagom (“just the right amount”). After I got to know Courtney I have learned that there are other exemptions to this rule. Each time we’ve been unable to figure out what word I’m looking for, I’ve always thought it was just the oh so common lack of English skills of yet another uneducated American (read Courtney), but in this case I was wrong! The friendly banter aside, it is of course true that English is a far richer language, but us poor Swedes live for these small, few and far inbetween victories. En lagomt stor vak = A hole in the ice with just the right size...phew!
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