The Swedish word "bra"
My friend Christophe is concerned to help me improving my Swedish so he recently send me the link to an e-mail service called "om ett ord". If you subscribe to this then they send you every day a bit of linguistics and history about one swedish word. Cool! If Mischa spoke Swedish, he'd definately love it ;)
Anyway, yesterday I was sent the explanation of "bra", the Swedish word for "good". I knew quite from the beginnings of my Swedish studies that there must be something special about this word. It's definately one of the most used words and from a grammatical perspective it's special because it's never inflected: en bra tjej, ett bra hus, några bra skämt. (A good girl, a good house, some good jokes.) But why? Well, now I know. It is another remaining of the thirty years' war when Swedish soldiers marched towards central Europe and imported the German word "brav" (brave, good, honest) into their own language. Weil nur ein braver Soldat ein guter Soldat ist ;) (Because only a brave soldier is a good soldier!)
Well, to be honest I think it's pretty interesting to see how many tracks in every day culture are still left from that war in the 17th century. In Vienna there are still some streetnames that (should) remind us of that. And how about the expression "Alter Schwede!"? Not that we actively think about it when we use this expression, but hm, I wonder if this will be the same for all the horrible stuff that happened during the last 60 years ...
Anyway, yesterday I was sent the explanation of "bra", the Swedish word for "good". I knew quite from the beginnings of my Swedish studies that there must be something special about this word. It's definately one of the most used words and from a grammatical perspective it's special because it's never inflected: en bra tjej, ett bra hus, några bra skämt. (A good girl, a good house, some good jokes.) But why? Well, now I know. It is another remaining of the thirty years' war when Swedish soldiers marched towards central Europe and imported the German word "brav" (brave, good, honest) into their own language. Weil nur ein braver Soldat ein guter Soldat ist ;) (Because only a brave soldier is a good soldier!)
Well, to be honest I think it's pretty interesting to see how many tracks in every day culture are still left from that war in the 17th century. In Vienna there are still some streetnames that (should) remind us of that. And how about the expression "Alter Schwede!"? Not that we actively think about it when we use this expression, but hm, I wonder if this will be the same for all the horrible stuff that happened during the last 60 years ...
janis - 11. Apr, 09:39
