Practical Swedish in practice (and other assorted lingual cases)

Every language has its own special feature. What I find interesting, is the lack of English translation in certain words. For example in Swedish, I really enjoy some very practical words like 'hinna' (ehtiä), 'räcka' (riittää) and 'slippa' (välttyä) which are hard to translate into English using only one word. As you can see the Finnish equivalents in brackets, we face the same problems in English translation. Because Sweden and Finland have shared a large piece of history together (and still do in some form), we have a fitting one-word translation to most of the words in our vocabularies.

hinna - to have time to do something

räcka - to be enough

slippa - to avoid doing something

There's a whole lot more example words out there I'm sure, but my limited ability of understanding Swedish and other excuses prevent me from listing them all.

One of my favorite words in Swedish is 'självklart' (tietysti/of course; Finland-Swedish use 'förstås' instead, but I never heard anyone use that in Stockholm), another being 'höjdare' (isokenkäinen, kohokohta/boss, climax). I especially like the term "Det var ingen höjdare", when the food wasn't that good. I also like 'neka' (kieltää/deny) which probabaly comes from 'tacka nej'. At least that's how I remember what it means.

Now that I think of it, there are no English favorite words for me at the moment. Well, maybe 'sporadic' and 'respectively', but as I try to avoid repeating myself; I don't use them any more often than other words. That's my goal anyway.

Also two words, 'about' and 'around' have possessed me. In some context they mean the same - for example 'mess around' vs. 'mess about', 'fiddle around' vs. 'fiddle about' and 'turn around' vs. 'turn about'. I have noticed that the British use 'about' much more often. Maybe it's just another US/UK difference?

Another nice word is 'fortnight'. It used to be in high school graduation aural exams every year. It means 14 nights i.e. two weeks, and many fell for it. Year after year, but not me. That's why I still like that word.

In Finnish, two words have recently entered my active vocabulary: 'taputeltu' (finished) and 'tunteroinen' (about/around one hour). These can't be found in any official dictionaries I suppose, but the feel they give me is positive. And that's what counts.

I heard from an ex-team member that my English has improved since I started blogging in BlogSpot. That's really weird. I asssumed that it would have gone down a bit, because let's face it, I don't need that much English in Finland. Also my Swedish has gone down rapidly. I have considered of creating a sibling blog in Swedish, but I'm not convinced if I had the time and the strength for it. And the vocabulary...

This blog has 31,5 % of Finnish readers and the amount is increasing - approaching the magical 50 % limit. The Swede count is slightly decreasing, but it's still by far the greatest bunch. I miss a lot of Finnish wordplays by writing this in English. Then again, I get to have a conversation with the whole world, if you will. 42 countries can't be THAT wrong.