After reading the articles by Crystal on how the brain handles language and how we use symbols to communicate with one another, I found the texts very relevant to what I have been learning so far this semester about the Swedish language. I particularly find it interesting to compare English with Swedish when I feel as if something is fundamentally different about the two languages. The same can be done for Spanish. Because I took Spanish all through high school I immediately recognized gendered nouns in the Swedish I was learning. In English we have no set genders for objects. In Spanish and Swedish, however, the nouns are gendered. In Swedish you could say "en stol" to mean a chair and "ett skrivbord" to mean a desk. It was helpful that I took Spanish so that I could recognize this pattern in Swedish.
Additionally, I find that Swedish is a cool language because words build off one another. If you know the word for hotel, street, and back, you can come up with the word in Swedish that means a back-alley hotel (bakgatshotell). I also think it's really neat that in Swedish rather than saying my maternal grandmother, there is a specific word for that person. Your mormor is your mom's mom and your farmor is your dad's mom. This is just another example where Swedish is very clear.
Comments
In Turkish, mother means "anne" and maternal grandmother is "anneanne" and paternal granmother is "babaanne", just like Swedish. Do you think this has any cultural implications?