Whenever I heard my grandmother – who was from the North of England – say something was ‘dear’ (i.e. expensive), I assumed nothing could be more English than this classic colloquial word.
Then I was on Blocket – a Swedish eBay – and it had a little indicator on each sale item, telling you if Blocket thought the item’s sale price was expensive (or ‘dyr’ in Swedish). Hang on, I thought… dyr?
So, it turns out the English of the Danelaw regions have never stopped saying ‘dyr’. You can bring in your Latin expens, but when it comes to the price of bread, we’ll keep our own words, thank you very much!
How come?
Here’s another English colloquialism. Rather than asking ‘Why is that?’ we often ask ‘How come?’ What could be more English? Well, then I saw this sentence in my last Swedish class: Hur kommer det sig att en boxare inte får lov att tävla med skägg? (How come a boxer is not allowed to compete with a beard?) Hur kommer? How come?
The more you look, the more you see. ‘Hoppa’ means ‘jump’. ‘Springa’ means ‘run’. ‘Pratar’ means talk, or prattle, as we sometimes say. ‘Barn’ means child, as any Geordie or Scot could tell you. And ‘kvinna’ – which sounds very like ‘queen’ – means ‘woman’.
English is a mongrel language
It may have stalked the globe, but we all know English is a mishmash of Nordic, Germanic and French, with a solid spicing of other lingos from around the world. Living in Sweden, the debt to the Norse tongue is obvious.
Loads of Swedish words sound very like English equivalents. Even when it looks strange written down, when spoken the link often becomes clear.
When you see ‘Näste station’ on the screen in trains, you can make an educated guess that ‘näste’ must mean ‘next’, but when you hear the conductor pronounce it, it becomes basically the same word.
Language is always being made and unmade, as my son showed me with Lost and Found Words
