When Your Tooth Hurts Posted by Transparent Language on Aug 8, 2008 in Culture, Vocabulary
Today is our Queen’s name day (Silvia) and also the first day of the Olympic Games, but I’m not really that fond of either one. The Queen has always struck me as creepily Stepfordish. I mean, is that woman even real or is she just a life-size paper cut-out? You know, like those of Star Trek characters that you can buy if you’re geeky enough to attend sci-fi conventions. But personally, I would much rather prefer to have a stand-up cardboard figure of Lt. Worf than of Drottning Silvia (drottning = queen). And name days? I’ve never been a fan of them.
Anyway, where were we? Ah yes, the Olympic Games. You don’t need me to blog about that – just turn on your TV and you’ll get your Olympic overload.
So instead I thought I’d blog today about something actually useful. Maybe not as entertaining as making fun of Queen Silvia, but much more practical – namely, going to the dentist.
This is a topic that many, normally cold and indifferent Swedes feel very passionate about. Why? Many reasons, and I’m not going to discuss them here. But in short – it takes a long time to get an appointment with a “public” dentist and private dentists are very expensive. And even then, getting an appointment can be an ordeal.
First, in order to make an appointment, you have to call. And in order to call, you have to know the appropriate telephone times (telefon tider) when a live person will pick up the phone and tell you that the doctor is fully booked until, oh about 2011.
Telefon tider are a sacred Swedish tradition. Almost every business, government office, customer service help line, health clinic and everything else you can think of has them. Basically what it means is that you can only call such a place during their designated telephone times, which for example, at our local clinic are 9:00 to 11:00 and 13:30 to 15:00, except Fridays when nobody bothers to pick up the phone anyway. During those periods, someone, in theory at least, should answer the phone, but most likely you will end up in a telephone queue, spend the remainder of the telephone time on hold, and then will be abruptly disconnected when the clock strikes 11 or 15, or whenever the phone time ends.
Fortunately, most private doctors are abandoning this custom, and if you’re lucky, you can actually find a practice where a perky assistant picks up the phone during normal business hours, answers questions, schedules appointments and does what an office assistant should. And that’s exactly what my favorite dental clinic does. For that service alone I don’t mind paying through the nose.
But first things first. In order to go to the dentist, you should know what a dentist is in Swedish, right?
- tandläkare (def. tandläkaren, plural: tandläkare, def. plural: tandläkarna) – person som har yrke att laga tänder – person whose job is to fix teeth.
This word is actually made up of two separate words:
- läkare = doctor
and
- tand (def. tanden, plural: tänder, def. plural: tänderna) = tooth
So, “tandläkare” basically means a “tooth doctor”. Easy, isn’t it?
And you’ve probably also noticed that “tand” (tooth) gets an irregular plural form – tänder (teeth). Just like in English. Creepy…
There is really a bazillion other words that start with “tand” and have to do with teeth and dental care.
- tandvärk – toothache
- tandtråd – dental floss
- tandvård – dentistry, dental care
- tandkött – gums (in your mouth)
- tandpetare – toothpick
- tandkräm – toothpaste
- tandfyllning – filling (in a tooth)
And so on…
To Be Continued… (oh, this is going to be fun!)
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Comments:
ceci:
oh anna!!! you are great!!! i liked so much this post!!! i am learning a lot with this blog, tack!
dont forget lycksele…! are you living by there??
bye, ceci
Louis:
Hi, before I tell you the reason for my email, I just want to say that I, being curious about languages, had somehow stumbled across your blog, and receives regular RSS feeds about Swedish, which I thoroughly enjoy — you have a compelling way of writing !
Reason for my email : I am actually Afrikaans speaking, from South Africa, a language which evolved, most widely assumed, mostly from Dutch origin, and some German/French input. Well, since I’ve been reading your blog feeds, I could’t help to be stunned by the similarity between Swedish nouns and Afrikaans nouns, some of them are exactly the same (at least in spelling, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the pronunciation is similar too). Just some examples, and this is just from your last 3 blogs, I have found these similarities in every blog so far :
Swedish Afrikaans
Rökt Gerookte
Folkgrupp Folkgroep
norra noordelike
Ryssland Rusland
spräk spraak (also means ‘speech’)
en ‘n
sorts soort
säng sang
ord woord
land land
Telephon Telefoon
Tand Tand
Amazing — surely all these cannot come from Dutch alone. It does seem as though there may have been a more significant input from Scandinavia in the birth and development of the Afrikaans language between 1652 and today, than is usually believed. I am passionate about the Afrikaans language, but unfortunately a battle on all fronts is waged to suppress it. My grandfather’predecessor was reportedly of Danish descent, his surname was Wium. Have you come across this name in Scandinavia, and perhaps know what it means ?
Kind regards
Louis
South Africa
Anna:
ceci,
Lycksele is coming up, no worries! 😉
Hello Louis!
Thank you for your message. I think the similarities have to do with the fact that Dutch/Afrikaans are of Low Franconian Germanic descent, and Swedish (along with Danish and Norwegian) are North Germanic, so they all have the same point of origin. Also, don’t forget that back in the olden days them Dutch liked to get around and most of the Scandinavian ports were part of the Hanseatic League, so some linguistic mixing was unavoidable.
But the general similarities between all Germanic languages make it fairly easy for a speaker of one to learn another. All Afrikaans speakers I have met in Sweden (and there are quite a few!) speak fabulous Swedish!
And as for the surname “Wium”, it is definitely more popular in Denmark than in Sweden (a quick search of phone listings in Sweden gave no results!). Though I have met one guy from Norway with that last name, too.
Louis:
Hi Anna !
Thank you for your very informative answer — you’ve confirmed what I started to suspect, but with an interesting analysis including facts I didn’t know. The pieces of the puzzle are all starting to come together for me now — I had actually never known that Scandinavian languages are of Germanic descent, although in hindsight it now seems obvious.
I was always under the impression that only Dutch and Flemish, and to a lesser extent German, was related to Afrikaans. This opens up a whole new lot of opportunity to learn more languages.
Keep the blogs coming !!
Louis
Anna:
Hi Louis!
Oh yes, even English is of Germanic origin. Actually, that’s how I divide all European languages for my personal purposes:
1. The ones with somewhat easy grammars – Germanic languages
2. The ones with more convoluted grammars but still possible to learn – Roman languages
3. The incomprehensible (to most people) ones – Slavic
and 4. The oddballs like Hungarian and Finnish, Estonian, etc. which for all I know might be simply Klingon spoken backwards. 😉
Anne:
HELP!!!
I don’t know where to find this….
My husband’s mother keeps commenting about some sausage they used to have every Christmas, and I don’t know what I’m looking for…
She pronounces it “ku-kor”…she says it’s white on the outside and pink on the inside….can you please help me spell and explain how to serve this?
Thanks….
Anna:
Anne,
it sounds to me like your mother in law talks about “julskinka”, which is simply Christmas ham. That’s what it looks like from your description – white on the outside, pink inside. The pronunciation leaves me very confused however. It sounds like she might have been saying “grynkorv” with a strong accent. That’s a sausage popular during Christmas.
here’s a website, but only in Swedish: http://grynkorv.se/index.html
David from Oregon:
Telephone times are often necessary especially for small businesses. What is the problem with waiting until the proper time before calling? Do we always need instant gratification? In the 70’s my dentist in Stockholm worked completely alone except for a dental assistant. She had no secretary or receptionist or bookkeeper. You had to call during her telephone times to talk to her. She couldn’t very well drop her tools and go answer the phone every time it rang. But that doesn’t mean she was inflexible or uncaring. I remember breaking a tooth on some Swedish breakfast cereal one Saturday
morning. By Sunday I looked like I had a tennis ball in my mouth from the swollen jaw. On Monday morning I was sitting on the steps outside her office waiting for her when she came to work. She took one look at me and took me right in and fixed me up. It was the best root canal I ever had. She had these great big brown eyes and really long eyelashes.
And the cost of a private dentist was not that expensive. Just because they are private doesn’t mean that the costs aren’t subsidized by the government. The government issues lists of treatments and the amount they subsidize for each treatment. You only paid the balance that is left over. It only cost me a very affordable few hundred kronor for the root canal. Of course indirectly I paid more through the personal income taxes I was paying. I don’t know how it works if a person is not legally working in Sweden or a Swedish citizen. The only real problem I had with dentists in Sweden is the same problem people have everywhere: finding a competent dentist you like and trust and is accepting new patients. Did I mention the big brown eyes?
Anna:
Hi David and thanks for your comment!
I’m not sure how it was in the 70s as I was just a wee lil one back then, but these days when voicemail is a standard feature of most telephone subscription plans for small businesses and any idiot knows how to use it, there’s really no need for designated telephone times.
And regarding the cost of private dental care, things have changed a bit since then too. Considering that my own dentist suggests trips to Estonia for major dental work, I’d say it’s a lot more expensive and a lot less subsidized now than you remember it. In fact, I read somewhere that certain procedures are not subsidized at all anymore for people between the ages of 18 and 55.
bid ninja:
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Nelly Krejci:
Many of these houses are typical ugly modern architecture houses. Things have not changed much since the post war when people lived in rabbit hutch concrete boxes. Part of this is simplifying our lives. The? other is having to reduce the quality of our lives due to increasing overpopulation, which few want to deal with.