regshoe | Entries tagged with svenska

Ronja rövardotter av Astrid Lindgren (1981). Jag har läst en hel bok på svenska :D Very slowly, partly because I can still only read slowly and have to stop to look things up very often, and partly because that slowness and effort means I can only do a little bit at a time, rather than using my usual longer stretches of relaxing reading time for it. But it's an achievement!

Anyway, the book. It is about Ronja, the young daughter of a robber chieftain, who lives in the forest with her father and mother and her father's band of robbers. One day another, rival gang of robbers arrive in the forest, causing much strife. Ronja meets Birk, the rival robber chieftain's son, who's about the same age as her; at first they hate each other as much as their respective fathers could wish, but eventually—amongst a lot of exciting adventures in the forest involving various real and supernatural wildlife—they become friends. But of course the tension between their friendship and their families'/robber gangs' bitter enmity leads to trouble... it's sort of the children's book version of a D. K. Broster plot, with much heartrending conflict between different loyalties. But of course everything is resolved happily in the end.

I really enjoyed it! I think my favourite thing about it was the setting amongst the wild forest—the book is full of descriptions of nature, the wild inhabitants of the forest and the changing seasons, which are all really lovely—and I also liked the fantasy elements and all the dramatic, exciting adventure they lead to (the vildvittror are especially memorable). I liked Ronja very much, and her friendship with Birk is cute. And the first edition which I read has some absolutely gorgeous illustrations, which made a perfect accompaniment to those nature descriptions.

The book has been translated into English as Ronia, the Robber's Daughter, which spelling confuses me slightly (I wouldn't be sure how to pronounce Ronia, and might have gone with 'like Estonia' rather than 'like Sonia', whereas Ronya would have been much more obvious). Never mind. Perhaps I'll read the translation at some point and compare them—that would be fun.

I'm not making much active progress with learning Swedish at the moment, though I'm still watching an occasional TV programme and picking up a few new words here and there. I may manage to do a bit more over the next few months—we'll see. :)

I don't think there's an exact equivalent for 'recent', so possibly that should be 'senast'? But hopefully it makes sense.

Once Upon a Fic author reveals have happened! It's been a good exchange. :D My Twa Corbies gift is by

water_bby—thank you!

And here's what I wrote! This fandom was new to me—when I saw a Swedish ballad in the tagset I had to check it out, and I'm very glad I did. It's a great song and I had lots of fun writing for it—plenty of opportunity for nature descriptions and weird mundane world/fairyland contrasts.

Bittida en morgon (2492 words) by regshoe
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Herr Mannelig (Traditional Ballad)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Herr Mannelig/Bergatroll
Characters: Herr Mannelig, Bergatroll (Herr Mannelig)
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, POV Outsider
Summary:

Herr Mannelig makes a different choice.

While I'm here, I'm also going to rec 'Herr Mannelig' itself, specifically this recording by Garmarna, which I listened to many times while writing my story. I love the ominous fairytale-magic mood, and the lead singer's voice is amazing. The lyrics are here on Wikipedia with an English translation.

Watch on YouTube

Here's a seasonal song from my faves Folk & rackare—this song is about Valborgsnatt/Walpurgis Night, 30 April, the traditional beginning of spring and—according to this song—an occasion for much celebration, dancing and eating of eggs.

Watch on YouTube

I love how joyful the whole thing sounds—it makes me feel just like dancing to a fiddle in the long April evening in a forest with the new green of spring all upon it—and the lyrics, which are a funny mixture of spring-related and folk-music-typical stuff. I especially like the image 'skogen den bär gröner hatt' (the forest is wearing a green hat). Here are the lyrics with an English translation, if you would like to see the rest. Anyway, the weather here is very nice today, everything is pleasingly green and the birds are singing; I think that maj är definitivt välkommen här. :)

I have recently completed the Swedish language tree (det svenska trädet, as one of the final exercises reminds me) on Duolingo! This is an accomplishment, and I feel quite pleased with myself. I can do the pluperfect and sometimes even the subjunctive and I know lots of bird names and other words.

As for what I'm doing next, Duolingo has various additional bits—practice exercises of the vocabulary and grammar already introduced—which I'm still working through, and then I'm reading and watching/listening to things and trying to improve my vocabulary, a slow process. I am still a very long way from actual fluency, but I am definitely improving—reading a not-too-complicated story, I can usually get the basic sense of a paragraph on the first try, and find myself looking words up more to check their precise meaning than to figure out the basics of what's going on at all. Listening is harder—currently my comprehension of simple sentences with familiar words is at the level of English when my auditory processing is playing up, and I still get lost with anything much more complicated, but again my ability to follow the general sense of things is improving.

(I'm also starting to be able to recognise the features of different Swedish accents, which is kind of fun—although I still have very little idea which is which!).

At the moment I'm watching a documentary series on SVT about Kebnekaise, the highest mountain in Sweden, and the people who live and work around it—a lot of beautiful scenery and fascinating stories, and I'm really enjoying it. I recently came across a seasonal rec for a Swedish version of Jesus Christ Superstar and have been listening to a few of the songs today—this looks like great fun, and I think I'll watch the whole thing sometime.

At some point I will try to acquire an actual book (a children's book with fairly simple language, I think, possibly something by Astrid Lindgren) and start reading and just see how it goes. I probably can read quite a lot faster than I actually am reading at the moment, since I don't need to look words up and make notes as much as I do to make sure of things, so it's difficult to know exactly how far from being able to do that I am. Perhaps I shall just plunge in at some point.

An interesting etymological ramble I've been meaning to post about for a while...

Some time ago I was thinking about the Middle English song 'Mirie it is while sumer ilast' (as you do), and I thought, hmm, 'with fugheles song'—surely 'fugheles' is the same word as 'fågel', the Swedish for 'bird'? So I looked it up and yes, it is; more obviously, they're also both the same as the modern English word 'fowl', which must have lost the G somewhere along the way.

'Fowl' used to mean what 'bird' and 'fågel' mean now, referring to the entire class of Aves, but it's rare these days, and most of its surviving uses are in specific contexts to do with domesticated birds and hunting (wildfowl, Guinea fowl, etc.). I'd never heard of any other distinction between 'bird' and 'fowl'; but The Country Housewife and Lady's Director by Richard Bradley, a housekeeping manual published in the mid-eighteenth century which I recently read for fic research, makes a very specific one: according to Bradley,

a Fowl always leads it's young Ones to the Meat, and a Bird carries the Meat to the Young: For this Reaſon, we find that Fowls always make their Neſts upon the Ground, while Birds, for the moſt part, build their Neſts aloft; ſo then our common Poultry are Fowls, the Pheaſant, Partridge, Peacock, Turkey, Buſtard, Quail, Lapwing, Duck, and ſuch like are all Fowls: But a Pigeon is a Bird, and a Stork, or Crane, and a Heron, are Birds, they built their Neſts aloft, and carry Meat to their young ones.

This is the distinction between what modern ornithology calls 'precocial' and 'altricial' birds. I don't know how widespread using 'bird' and 'fowl' like this ever was, but I've never come across it before and it's not in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The word 'bird', meanwhile, is rather mysterious. It appears in Old English as a word for young birds, and took a bit of a semantic detour through young animals in general and young humans before becoming a synonym of 'fowl' in Middle English and eventually supplanting it as the generally-used English word for Aves. But where it actually came from, we don't know; it's not part of the fughel/fowl/fågel group of words in Germanic languages, nor is it related to Latin (avis) or French (oiseau) or Welsh (aderyn) or anything else, apparently. I imagine some Anglo-Saxon peasant looking thoughtfully at a robin and going, 'you know what, Egbert? I'm not going to call that a fowl any more. I mean, it just looks more like a bird to me, you know?'

The Fabulous Sylvester by Joshua Gamson (2005). Subtitled The Legend, the Music, the Seventies in San Francisco, this is a biography of the musician Sylvester, a gay African-American soul/blues/disco singer who grew up in Los Angeles and lived and worked in San Francisco in the memorable seventies. I read it for book club—having little knowledge of either Sylvester's music or the general cultural/historical background, both of which are explored in detail, I found it very interesting, although the sheer amount and arrangement of specific details got slightly confusing at times. And I didn't have much to contribute at the book club meeting, but never mind—next month's book is a sci-fi novella, so perhaps I shall have more developed opinions about that...

Finished Her Enemy, Some Friends and Other Personages, which continued both highly varied and enjoyable. Unfortunately, 'Aquae Multae Non—' is still my favourite story in the collection—it was a bit of a disappointment having that come second, so that nothing else really lived up to it, although plenty of the other stories are both good and interesting. Edward Prime-Stevenson greatly enjoys self-reccing and mischievous references: 'Out of the Sun', an otherwise rather depressing story, contains a passage describing the main character's collection of queer books, which includes Xavier Mayne's Imre and The Intersexes amongst others (it also includes The Hill and David Copperfield, which amused me—I knew I was onto something shipping David/Steerforth...). Xavier Mayne turns up a few other times, and we also get various other bits of silliness, alongside EPS's thoughts on the philosophy of art, some more fairytales and fables and a couple of religious stories. 'A Prisoner Passes', about the crucifixion of Jesus from the point of view of a Roman bystander, was another favourite of mine—perhaps the shape of the plot was a little obvious, but it was touching even so, and I loved how very EPS the description of Jesus was—he manages to imply so much about his queer reading of the Bible in a short space. The final story, 'Sunrise-Water', is an unfinished novel—I did not know this, so I was disappointed when it suddenly ended halfway through. It was building up to a nice dramatic plot about burglary and intrigue, and also briefly had a rare really interesting relationship between two female characters.

Damn' Rebel Bitches: The Women of the '45 by Maggie Craig (1997). One can never have too many Jacobite history books, and I thought this one sounded like a particularly valuable perspective on the events of the '45—Craig sets out to redress the balance of male-centric history writing, exploring the varied stories of women in the Rising. There are all sorts of fascinating stories in here, and a theme throughout is the diversity of things women did: there are women who persuaded their husbands to fight for the Cause, women who themselves raised men for Charles's army, camp-followers on the march into England, prisoners in York and London and transported to America, women escaping from prison and helping others to escape, Hanoverian women, spies and informers, a fresh look at the more famous Jacobite women Flora MacDonald and Clementine Walkinshaw, and so on and so on. All fascinating stuff! The arrangement of information could be a bit confusing at times—the short chapters are organised by broad themes, which means that the shape of the book follows neither the chronology of the Rising nor the individual stories of specific people exactly, and the resulting jumping around occasionally made things difficult to follow. But it was all very interesting indeed.

Almost as interesting as the history itself was Craig's approach to it. She discusses in some detail the process of historical research, describing her sources (which included some familiar letters from The Lyon in Mourning), who wrote them and where they came from, and the difficulties of piecing together the facts of a story from fragmentary and vague historical evidence. Her style is very informal, almost chatty—I get the sense that she's writing somewhat in deliberate contrast to the academic history which she feels has tended to leave women out—and her personality comes through very strongly, passionate, opinionated and impatiently cheerful. This made for enjoyable reading, although I thought some of the personal opinions and speculation went a bit too far at times. She talks about her own love of the history, her feelings about her historical subjects and her sympathy for them—and she also mentions, at the end of the book, other women's historical interest in the Jacobites and their place in the developing history itself, from Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne, writing romantic Jacobite ballads to what Craig calls 'the two greatest novels ever written about the '45'—The Flight of the Heron and Flemington! Clearly she's one of us. :D

I've found out that I can access some of the programmes on SVT Play, the Swedish equivalent of BBC iPlayer, which is a good resource! There are some nature documentaries, a 1960s adaptation of Pippi Långstrump and various news and current affairs programmes, amongst other things. This week I tried watching a nature documentary film called 'Den levande skogen' ('The Living Forest'), about the animals of the Swedish forest. My Swedish is not yet good enough to follow the narration properly, but I could pick up a few phrases here and there, and of course a wildlife documentary has plenty to enjoy even if you can't understand the words. And I did manage to learn some bird names—fiskgjuse, stare, trana (tranorna! <333), örn, häger (although I had already looked that one up ;D ), svan—these being the most important vocabulary to learn, of course.

I'd been thinking vaguely for a while that I'd like to try learning another language properly. Swedish seemed a good idea partly because I've been into Swedish books and music lately, partly because it's fairly closely related to English (twice, actually) and the similarities might make it easier to learn than a completely unrelated language and partly because I want to visit Sweden and do lots of birdwatching in the future.

So I've been doing lessons on Duolingo, supplemented with some very helpful Youtube videos on pronunciation (I can now understand things like 'voiceless velar fricative', which feels very impressively technical)—and I've now got myself a dictionary and reference grammar, which looks like it'll be very useful for sorting out all those verb types and so on. (Duolingo is good for practising vocabulary but its grammatical explanations are fairly basic). Folk songs are also very good for making vocabulary memorable, especially the more repetitive ones—I've learnt all the words in this very simple song, and am working on more ballads.

(I've also set up my keyboard to type in Swedish, which makes it easier to do this öäå but also moves all the punctuation around, which is slightly confusing—I'm developing a second muscle memory to remember where everything is).

That thought about similarity is true so far—a lot of basic Swedish vocabulary is very similar to English (katt/cat, hus/house, gå/go and so on)—and, interestingly, of course for historical reasons, it's especially similar to northern English, and also Scots. I'm finding a lot of geographical terms and other northern dialect/Scots words, which lead to terribly interesting etymological investigations—so e.g. dal/dale(/valley), gråta/greet(/cry), barn/bairn(/child), vilka/whilk(/which)... as Horrible Histories memorably put it, thank a Viking!

But the differences are also interesting, and I'm enjoying learning some neat grammatical features that English doesn't have. So e.g. instead of having a word for 'the', Swedish nouns add a suffix to become definite (en katt, a cat; katten, the cat), which I think is quite elegant, and which also makes learning noun genders easier because the suffixes are different. Swedish also still has the singular/plural 'you' distinction which has been lost in English (the singular, du, is I think related to 'thou'), which is very useful!

Obviously it will be good to learn more Swedish ballads in the future, and read books, etc. (I read some of Astrid Lindgren's books in English as a child, and I think they'll be nice to revisit when I get to that stage). I'm not sure how good my speaking skills will ever get—being autistic, speaking isn't always the easiest in English—but hey, it's an experiment, we shall see.

My latest musical love is the 70s Swedish folk group Folk och Rackare (thanks to

luzula for introducing me to them :D). From what I gather, they were doing the same sort of thing bands like Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention were doing around the same time in English, reviving and reinventing old ballads and other traditional songs (of which Scandinavia has a rich tradition), though the one album I've listened to so far is not quite so rock-y as Steeleye get.

Here's one of my favourites from them so far—this has a very lovely, evocative tune, and according to this translation of the lyrics it's about the hard life of a servant, starving on an inadequate diet and enduring cruelty at the hands of the master and mistress:

Watch on YouTube

And here's a Swedish version of the ballad I learnt in Scots as 'The Twa Sisters', which is a very international song—Child notes the existence of variants from England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, the Faroes and Finland, as well as similar ballads from Estonia and Lithuania.

Watch on YouTube

For a bit more fascinating comparative balladry, here is a Scottish version of the same ballad and here is Folk och Rackare's Swedish version translated into Scots!