Introducing a new and hopefully regular installment to thoughtofvg-words of the world!
Some of you may have caught onto the fact that I don’t just love the english language but also many many others. I actually hope to study German at university, with either Chinese or the Scandinavian languages depending on how things go. This love of all words led me to come up with this wonderful idea where I look at some words from different languages that I love for one reason or the other. I hope you enjoy this new idea as much as I feel I am going to, but please comment to tell me what you think!
So heres my first word of the world….
the swedish word ‘F├Ñr’
To start off with, it would seem like a fairly mundane word as it is the present tense form of the verb ‘F├Ñ’ or in english, ‘to get’. For example ‘kan jag f├Ñr en öl tack?’ (don’t quote me on the gender of öl…) which would translate as ‘Can i get a beer please?
But where this small swedish word gets a little more interesting is when you find out that ‘F├Ñr’ means something else… It’s also the swedish noun for ‘sheep’.
I’m sure english has similarly entertaining words with double meanings, but I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Feel free to help me out with that in the comments, but at the moment f├Ñr and f├Ñr are the winners in my vocabulary.
I can imagine a few unfortunate conversations where, if the swedish was fairly broken and not particularly well spoken, you could really f├Ñr your ‘f├Ñrs’ in a bit of muddle. How about-‘farfar, f├Ñr f├Ñr f├Ñr?’ (grandad, do sheep get sheep?’) Now I don’t know about you readers, but i think that is a bit of f├Ñr overload. Or how about ‘kan jag f├Ñr en tv├Ñ ├Ñr gammal f├Ñr.’ (can i have a two year old sheep?). Although i really don’t think that sentence would ever be said in reality, its fun to muse on anyway.
Luckily, before you f├Ñr to mixed up, just remember its all in the context. Just like all those english double meaning words that I can’t think of at the moment.
and one last note…isn’t the ├Ñ possibly the coolest accented vowel in existence? or is that just my word geekdom shining through there? (oh and ├Ñ can be a word all on its own! all we have in english for one letter words are pronouns and articles…the amazing swedish language has ├Ñ meaning ‘river’! ├Ñ how about that…)
So thats my first installment of words of the world-please comment and tell my if you like this and whether i should keep it permanently. I can tell you that i really enjoyed writing it! If you really enjoyed reading this, why not hit the facebook like button on the side of my blog to help build up my facebook community! Thanks for reading.
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Awesome idea for a series of posts. I also like finding out the origin of English sayings and expressions. Now, do you know where I can find a two year old sheep?
Awesome idea for a series of posts. I also like finding out the origin of English sayings and expressions. Now, do you know where I can find a two year old sheep?
hmm, i hadn’t thought of doing english sayings…i like that idea!
and about that sheep…try wales, scotland or new zealand-the world capital of sheep. f├Ñr your tv├Ñ ├Ñr f├Ñr before its too late.
You have to catch them young, so you can … never mind.
Do you know why the Scotts invented the kilt?
Because Scottish sheep can hear a zipper being lowered from a mile away… (ha)
don’t want to ruin the joke, but the kilt was originally irish and was adopted by the scots 🙁