shades of blue

I just realized that kornblått= blåklintsblått eftersom cornflower= blåklint. Maybe everyone else already had this figured out.

(I'm sorry that this only makes sense if you are a bilingual Swedish person.)

the deal with the ä and the ö

Babs told me about this very funny bit in the current issue of The New Yorker. Nora Ephron makes fun of Stieg Larsson. Only problem? Ephron doesn't know that a Swedish keyboard contains the actual å, ä, and ö letters. The title of the piece is The Girl Who Fixed the Umlaut, and Ephron, along with every other American, is stuck in the belief that the two dots above the o or a, to make the ä and ö, are umlauts. They are not. They are parts of the letter. Ä and ö aren't as and os gone wild, they are real stand-alone letters.

How?

Well, umlauts indicate vowel shifts. Some uses of å, ä and ö in modern Swedish can be traced back to vowel shifts in the original German (from which lots of Swedish words were borrowed), but in some instances (and to the general public) å, ä and ö only represent sounds. (That was probably more than you wanted to know, but it's Saturday and you have the time.)

Here is a long complicated wikipedia article on the matter. And read Nora Ephron's piece. It's super funny.

simple swedish

This is funny, but probably incredibly confusing for the non-Swedish speaker when he gets to substantiv (nouns).

sea nettle (get it?)