Category Archives: Language

Posts on language. Although I may be found wanting since most of the old material is in Swedish, and being the “punful” guy I am, mostly not possible to translate…

Humor, Language

Fear the umlaut

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Many years ago, I was working in a project with two programmers from London. These guys, being monolingual, were of the firm conviction that your verbal proficiency indicated competence, intelligence and ability to deal with… well language.

They called my attempts at English “Yoda English” so when the time came to add texts to the app we were building one of the Brits were put on the task.

The customer was not happy.

See, the language in question was not English but Swedish and having someone that didn’t understand a single word of Swedish do the language management produced one of my favorite misspellings of a Swedish word.

The guy had entered “gödkanna” where he should have entered “godkänna”.

Godkänna means “approve” or “confirm”.

Gödkanna doesn’t really exist in a dictionary, but it is a grammatically correct word since it’s possible to construct compound words in many different ways in Swedish (yes every writing app programmer on planet Earth, you heard me right! If you want to create a list of all possible Swedish words aspell-style, it’ll probably be a pretty long list—like listing all possible positive integers…—the local dictionary on my Mac currently contains a whopping 3404 “unknown” Swedish words… 😐)

Anyway, “gödkanna” is a compound of “göd” here used as a prefix relating to “göda” meaning fertilize and “kanna” meaning can/pitcher.

Fertilizer can.

A can of shit?

(As a parenthesis; at this writing, Google Translate suggests “manure can” as a translation of “gödkanna”…)

The customer being in Telecom, it is correct to assume they did not want to pay for a can of manure…

Humor, Language

How not to translate cinnamon buns to Swedish

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I’m from Sweden. We’re known for being among the top consumers of coffee in the world (second only to the Finns).

We’re also, in some less particulate, places, known to eat lots of cinnamon buns while we’re doing “fika” (which, I’ve been told, was a 1700s construction of coffee “kaffi” used to circumvent the coffee bans of that time while planning to have some “fika”… however, the Internet disagrees, at least on the date (the early 1900s), and perhaps the cause… and why that may be is a long story with only Swedish references… so… moving on…)

With our fika we have cinnamon buns. Their spelling, however, is not at all as easy to get right as the “fika”, and, here are a couple of examples where the misspelling actually means something, I am sure, was not intended:

  • “Kanylbullar” (syringe buns) — if you ever wondered if you could get HIV from cinnamon buns… now you know
  • “Kanelbuller” (cinnamon noise) — this would be the noise traffic makes… or thunder… not the noise a stale cinnamon bun might make when you chew it… or, for that matter, the noise you make when you break a tooth on that stale cinnamon bun (not that it happens often, but still… not that noise…)
  • “Kanelbullar” (cinnamon buns, kanel = cinnamon, bullar = buns), right! The ones we’re always having with our “fika” (no, we’re not —  mostly we just have the coffee… it’s way easier to install a coffee machine than a cinnamon bun machine… — and the coffee will always be fresh longer… and the number of workplace accidents involving teeth will also be kept on a level that won’t excite the international rumor mill overly much…)