2002-05-27 18:00

Mycket Svenska!

Mycket svenska!

Ooh! Mycket svenska! Tinka linked to more Swedish literary stuffs than you can shake a stick at: there's the main page of Project runeberg (for it is them), a facsimile of the first edition of the world's finest newspaper and a dictionary and a Strindberg and an unrelated assortment of arty articles variously in English and Swedish (often both are available, for that parallel reader experience) including a review of a book about gossip (only in Swedish). Mmm, gossip.

Marvellous things, Internets, isn't it? Marvellous things, Tinkas, too, also, as well, of course.

Jag har varit i, uh, Winchcombe

I may never have been to Sweden, but I have now been to the Swedish pub in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire. Which means that I have now spoken Actual Swedish to an Actual Swedish Person (other than my teacher), for the first time ever! Whoop! That counts as a breakthrough, surely, even if I did only order meatballs.

The food is excellent, incidentally - a lot better than run-of-the-mill British pub food. The whole experience was more like a restaurant than a pub, really, even if we were eating from the bar snacks menu. I hope nobody ever tells them that having waitresses bring your beer to your table is deeply at odds with everything British pubs stand for.

Overall, I have no hesitation in pronouncing it the finest Scandinavia-themed restaurant experience in Gloucestershire - if not the whole South-West of England. Even if the only newspapers they had were (spit) English.

Swedish Sounds 3 - [t.]

Last time I wrote about the ordinary Swedish t and I promised to come back and do [t.]. So, here I am. Remember that [t] is pronounced dentally in Swedish, unlike English where it's on the alveolar ridge behind the teeth? Well, if you slide the point of contact between the tounge and the roof of your mouth backwards the Swedish position, through the English position, and keep going (try saying 't' at some of the points along the way) eventually you'll get to a position as far back as you can go. By that point, your tongue will have curled round to what's called a retroflex position, where it's the bottom part of it in contact with the roof of your mouth.

Swedish [t.] (the so-called retroflex t) is a t pronounced between these two extremes. Some people say half way; I use a position further back than English [t], nestling behind the alveolar ridge. It sounds quite different than the normal clean Swedish t. It's debateable whether it's really retroflex, but since we have to call it something and that's a a catchier name than "somewhat post-alveolar" there's no point getting uptight about the name.

So, what's it for? I thought you'd never ask. It's for words like fart (meaning speed or pace) - where 't' follows 'r' in the spelling the 'r' isn't pronounced. Instead [t] is replaced by [t.] in the pronunctiation. Note that the only difference between the words fart ([fA:t]) and fat ([fA:t.]) is the kind of t involved, so this distinction does matter. I recommend learning to pronounce it and once you're sure you can make the sound, then try listening out for it.