{"id":6729,"date":"2014-06-30T20:30:12","date_gmt":"2014-06-30T20:30:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/?p=6729"},"modified":"2014-07-01T01:53:13","modified_gmt":"2014-07-01T01:53:13","slug":"dogs-and-houses-swedish-gender-and-articles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/dogs-and-houses-swedish-gender-and-articles\/","title":{"rendered":"Dogs and houses: Swedish gender and articles"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Hej!<\/strong>\u00a0In today&#8217;s episode of Swedish with Steve, I discuss the two Swedish genders (common and neuter) and their respective articles, both indefinite and indefinite.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/T1p4qXO9ekI?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen title=\"Embedded video\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>In Swedish, there are two genders, or <strong>genus<\/strong>: <span style=\"text-decoration: underline\">common<\/span> and <span style=\"text-decoration: underline\">neuter<\/span>. The Swedes call these two genders\u00a0<span style=\"text-decoration: underline\"><em>utrum<\/em><\/span>\u00a0and <span style=\"text-decoration: underline\"><em>neutrum<\/em><\/span>, respectively. Many second-language students of Swedish, however, prefer to call them &#8220;-n-gender&#8221; and &#8220;-t-gender&#8221;, due to the standard declensions they take on.<\/p>\n<p>An example of a word of <span style=\"text-decoration: underline\">common gender<\/span> or <em>utrum<\/em> is <strong>hund<\/strong>, which means &#8220;dog&#8221;. An example of a word of <span style=\"text-decoration: underline\">neuter gender<\/span> or <em>neutrum<\/em>\u00a0is <strong>hus<\/strong>, which means &#8220;house&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Words of <span style=\"text-decoration: underline\">common gender<\/span> take on the indefinite article <em>en<\/em><\/strong>:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">Det h\u00e4r \u00e4r <strong>en hund<\/strong>. \u2013 <em>This is <strong>a dog<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Words of <span style=\"text-decoration: underline\">neuter gender<\/span><\/strong>, on the other hand, <strong>take on the indefinite article <em>ett<\/em><\/strong>:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">Det h\u00e4r \u00e4r <strong>ett hus<\/strong>. \u2013 <em>This is <strong>a house<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>As you can see, Swedish uses indefinite articles in basically the same way as English. Definite articles, on the other hand, are used slightly differently.<\/p>\n<p>In definite form, <strong><span style=\"text-decoration: underline\">common gender<\/span>\u00a0nouns\u00a0take on the definite suffix <em>-en<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">Det h\u00e4r \u00e4r <strong>hunden<\/strong>. \u2013 <em>This is <strong>the dog<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>As you see here, rather than preceding &#8220;dog&#8221; in the simple noun phrase &#8220;the dog&#8221;, <strong>Swedish tacks on the definite article to the end of the noun<\/strong>. <em>Hund <\/em>becomes <em>hunden<\/em>. In the case of <em>hus<\/em>, the word becomes <em>huset<\/em>:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">Det h\u00e4r \u00e4r <strong>huset<\/strong>. \u2013 <em>This is <strong>the house<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Not that hard, right? It gets a little more complicated when you\u2019ve got an adjective in a definite noun phrase. For example:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px\"><strong>den<\/strong> sn\u00e4lla hund<strong>en<\/strong> \u2013 <strong>the<\/strong> friendly dog<\/p>\n<p>As you can see, the phrase contains two instances of the definite article: one at the end of the noun, and one before the adjective. Don\u2019t let this scare you away; it\u2019s actually a very simple rule:\u00a0<strong>When you have anything within a definite noun phrase that precedes the noun itself, you add another instance of the definite article to the beginning of the phrase. <\/strong>This is a way to mark where the phrase begins and ends. For <span style=\"text-decoration: underline\">common gender<\/span> noun phrases, the initial definite article is <strong>den<\/strong>, as in the example. For neuter gender words, it\u2019s <strong>det<\/strong>, as in:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px\"><strong>det gula huset<\/strong> \u2013 <em>the yellow house<\/em><\/p>\n<p>So, that\u2019s all about Swedish gender and articles. Before I go, I would like to emphasize that <strong>the two Swedish genders DO NOT correspond to masculine and feminine in the Romance languages<\/strong>. The Swedish language originally had three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter; but the first two have since been meshed together to form the common gender. That\u2019s why, for example,\u00a0<strong>man<\/strong> and <strong>kvinna<\/strong>, &#8220;man&#8221; and &#8220;woman&#8221;, have the same grammatical gender, namely <em>utrum<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Hope you\u2019ve learned something today! <strong>Glad sommar!<\/strong> \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hej!\u00a0In today&#8217;s episode of Swedish with Steve, I discuss the two Swedish genders (common and neuter) and their respective articles, both indefinite and indefinite. In Swedish, there are two genders, or genus: common and neuter. The Swedes call these two genders\u00a0utrum\u00a0and neutrum, respectively. Many second-language students of Swedish, however, prefer to call them &#8220;-n-gender&#8221; and&hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"post-item__readmore\"><a class=\"btn btn--md\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/dogs-and-houses-swedish-gender-and-articles\/\">Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":62,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":""},"categories":[6,3079],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6729","post","type-post","status-publish","hentry","category-grammar","category-swedish-language"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/62"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6729"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6729\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6732,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6729\/revisions\/6732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}