Swedish and Danish
Swedish and Danish are closely related languages. Their differences are mainly found on the morphological level, the main lexicon is identical (or rather, very similar, with systematic differences), and the syntax is very similar. There are some differences, though.
Syntax
Particle order
Swedish keeps the verb together with a conjoined adverbial particle, where Danish separates them.
- (sv) Vill du köra in bilen
- (da) Vil du køre bilen ind
Swedish moves the reflexive pronoun sig along with the verb to V2 position, where Danish leaves it behind:
- (sv) I går tvättade sig Peter äntligen
- (da) I går vaskede Peter sig endelig
NP structure
Danish and Swedish have different NP patterns.
- (sv) Vita huset
- (da) Det hvide hus
- (nb) Det hvite huset
- (nn) Det kvite huset
In most NPs, Swedish has both the determiner den and the definite form of the noun. Danish, as always, cannot have both. Here, nn patterns with sv and nb with both sv and da (beware of non-idiomatic da, sv word choices, but the patterns are correct).
- (sv) Den stora utmaningen är att göra det rätta. Utmaningen er svår.
- (da) Den store udfordring er at gøre det rette. Udfordringen er vanskelig.
Existential sentences
Swedish can use "det" as an equivalent to the English "there", where Danish prefers "der",
- (sv) Det kommer en bil
- (da) Der kommer en bil
Relative clauses
In N + RC constructions, where the relativised constituent is subject, Danish uses either som or der as relativiser, whereas Swedish has som:
- (da) manden som er her (the man who is here)
- (da) manden der er her (the man who is here)
- (sv) mannen som är här
When the relativised constituent is the object, on the other hand, the relativiser must be som, also in Danish:
- (da) manden som jeg så (the man who I saw)
- (sv) mannen som jag såg (the man who I saw)
Passives
- (sv) Ytterligare prov kommer att tas under måndagen. (further test will be taken some time Monday)
- (da) Yderligere prøve vil blive taget i løbet af mandagen
Grammatical words
Modal verbs
Danish and Swedish use more or less the same set of modal verbs, but with different meaning.
(allow) sv: Man får inte röka här
da: Man må ikke ryge her
en: one is not allowed to smoke here
Some verbs also take different modals,
| Swedish | Danish | Modal | Gloss | Example |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| åka | tage | ha → være | to go | |
| föra | føre | ha → være | to take | Två personer har förts → To personer er ført |
| komma | komme | ha → være | to come | Min fru har kommit → Min kone er kommet hjem |
There is a list of the most frequent 250 verbs with the modal they take here.
Morphology
Supine
Resources
- http://w3.msi.vxu.se/~nivre/research/Talbanken05.html (A 300,000-word tree-bank: it is in XML, all words are nicely tagged with PAROLE-style tags, and it should be easy to build a morphological analyser and a PoS tagger from it; authors are likely be happy to let us use it if we cite them).
- http://www.isv.cbs.dk/~mbk/treebank/ (Danish tree bank, 100,000-word, as above, under the GPL)
- http://www.ling.su.se/staff/sofia/suc/suc.html (Stockholm Umeå Corpus: 1,000,000 Swedish words, tagged; a license has to be granted by authors - it was used for apertium-sv-da)
- http://www.woxikon.se Ordbok for svenska<->engelsk, tysk, nederlandsk...
- http://ordbok.nada.kth.se/ "Tvärslå är en nordisk ordbok bestående av många sammanslagna ordböcker"
See also
Further reading
- LUNDIN AKESSON Katarina (2003) "Constructions with låta, LET, reflexives and passive-s: a comment on some differences, similarities and related phenomena". Working papers in Scandinavian syntax ISSN 1100-097X
