This weekend I was at a birthday party for my friend Peter in a place called Byärsjölagård that I defy you to pronounce on the first try. What I've noticed about birthdays parties, or at least 18th birthday parties is that they celebrate them later after the actual date and make a rather big deal about it. They also do them in pairs from different classes, presumably to double the guest list and split the costs. I had a pretty good time there.
The day after I went to Simrishamn with my host family for a more formal party with some of their friends. It was very fancy, we had several courses, from soup with champagne and cream in it to Italian meat roll type things and then on to dessert which was kind of like custard with sweet almonds. Very good.
Today was a pretty normal day, Swedish For Immigrants then to Språkvärlden where I studied some Russian. My German friend Philipp got his Finnish book in the mail the other day so I helped him study with that as well. Philipps goal is to learn all the Scandinavian languages with the singular exception of Danish on the grounds that it sounds like someone trying to speak Swedish while choking on a hot potato. That includes Faroese and Icelandic, which are together only spoken by about 500,000 peopler. However, it's low number of native speakers is almost certainly made up for by or perhaps adds to the inherent coolness of both languages.
Dugir tú føroyskt? Eg veit það ekki!
(Do you speak Faroese? I don't know!)
Also in Icelandic, they don't take in any loanwords. They kind of just make it up from older words from their own language. For example is "talavölva" which means "computer" can literally be translated to "number seeress".
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
OK, so translate.google.com says for your sample phrase,
ReplyDelete[Enough føroyskt tú? I do not know!]
My question: who gets credit for the great Sagas - the original settlers or the ones centuries later who retold the stories to keep them alive?
I met a software/entrepreneur in Kalamazoo 8/2009; and I remember in grad school Magnus Magnusson from Iceland, too; something like 300,000 on the whole island? About the size of Grand Rapids, Michigan - so lots of cousins.