|
5 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
 Great
little Swedish grammar book, December 12, 2003
This is a very well organized, clear, and concise book on Swedish. As
a couple of other reviewers have noted, there aren't that many books
available on the subject on the mass market, for some reason, and so
your choices are fairly limited, unless you have access to a good
college library with more academic linguistic books.
Swedish is one of the main Germanic family languages, like English.
Supposedly, the language closest to modern-day English is Frisian, a
northwest German language, and Frisian and English share features that
no other members of the family have, according to an article I read
once, although they didn't say specifically what they were. But I do
recall that Frisians are sometimes the butt of jokes since they're
regarded sort of like "Okies" or rural, rustic folk in the U.S.
Anyway, having studied some German I thought I'd try to learn a
little about another Germanic family language, and this book was great
for that. Swedish grammar is more complex than English in that it is a
more highly inflected language, but it's really no worse than German, so
if you have some background in that, you'll be fine.
Nouns are declined for number, definiteness vs. indefiniteness, and
the nominative and genitive cases. There are five delension patterns
depending on the two letters the noun ends with, and a fifth that is
just the bare stem word. Adjectives are inflected the same way, and are
no longer inflected according to case as in Old Swedish. There are
nominative, possessive, and direct object forms for the pronouns.
Comparative and superlative forms in Swedish are pretty much idential
to English. Adverbs come in three types, plain adverbs, older noun or
adjective case forms (mostly datives) which have survived as adverbs,
and neuter adjectives used as adverbs. The last group is easy to form
from the indefinite neuter singular adjective, which isn't that
difficult.
Swedish verbs fall into one of five conjugations. The first three of
are called "weak," because they've undergone reduction historically and
lost the older Germanic stem changes. The fourth conjugation is usually
referred to as the "strong" conjugation, and the fifth as the "mixed"
conjugation (since it has a "strong" imperfect stem, but a "weak"
supine). Strong verbs are those that undergo an internal change in the
past tenses, such as in sleep, slept, or sing, sang, sung.
Swedish syntax is very similar to English, except for cases when
inverted word order is used, similar to what happens in German. Like
English, Swedish has some verbs that change their meaning in combination
with other words, such as adverbs, as in phrasal verbs, which are
constructions like run up a bill, run out of, brush up on, and so on,
where the meaning of the word "run" or "brush" changes. Unlike English,
but like German, the Swedish adverbs and particles can shift between
being used as a verb prefix or as separate words.
Swedish is one language that has been modelled on a computer since it
was regarded as being regular enough to create grammatical macros to
produce the grammar. I recently came across an example of such a
computer program, and so I thought I'd list the macro for the non-modal
auxiliary and finite modal verb-phrase formation rule:
(@vp.aux.vp(Aux,V),
vp:[@tense.aspect(TenseAspect), ...]) --? (Aux,
v:[semanticAux=y, arglist=(V,vp:[...]),
@tense.aspect(TenseAspect), ...]) + (V,
vp:[vform=(inf"/supine), ...].
Anyway, not sure I understand that myself but it sure looked cool.
But getting back to the present book, this is a very nice little
introduction to Swedish with a concise summary of the grammar and how it
differs from English. There are lots of useful example sentences in both
Swedish and English, some good vocabulary, and finally, not the least of
its virtues is that the price is right. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
