Some may have read my prior post on Swedish words for grandparents, and might wonder: ‘yet another post on language? C-mon!’. I am sorry for people who have exactly this thought, but these language issues keep popping up in my mind, and I just have to share them with the rest of you. The thing that popped up most recently being: grattis
In the rest of the civilized world (OK that may be harsh, but at least English-speaking countries and the Netherlands), we use the word ‘gratis’ for things that come very cheaply: charge-free. The price you pay is zero, which is good, independent on the product you actually get for free.
Swedes have this same word. ‘That is nice’, foreigners might think, ‘there should be more words that are similar in Swedish and English/Dutch.’ But then some Swedish lingvist (linguist… duh) must have heard this and came up with the next solution:
The word grattis.
It means: congratulations, happy (birthday/ marriageday/ anniversary/ graduation) and of course it is short for gratulera, which seems awfully similar to the English word gratulations.
So why not use the similar-to-English-word gratulera? Because grattis, that does NOT sound like gratulations at all. It sounds like gratis, and that is a completely different issue! Although both gratis and grattis are for free (I have never had to pay for my congratulations) they are not mutually exchangeable.
Suppose your grandmother (mormor or farmor) is having her birthday and you want to congratulate her on her ancientness. Saying ‘grattis mormor!’ would do the trick nicely, but ‘gratis mormor!’ would instead imply that you are putting your grandmother up for sale. Now even though the last option might seem appealing to some of you, this is usually NOT what you mean to say on someone’s birthday!
If a Swede were to sit next to me, he’d probably interrupt right now, stating the obvious difference between gratis and grattis in pronunciation. Let me try this in writing:
- Gratis is pronounced as groaaaa-tis
- Grattis is pronounced as grattt-tis
Yes, I can totally hear the difference (she said with a cynical tone).
To me it makes no sense. Here we had a word ‘gratulations’ that is similar in both sound and meaning to English and other European languages – even the French use it! But instead of just accepting that the world can be a simple place to live in, Swedes go about complicating things by abbreviating the term gratulera into grattis, which sounds nothing like gratulations but is strikingly similar to gratis, which is also a word well-known in most European languages (Dutch people in particular), but IT MEANS something completely different!
This simply won’t do, I would definitely opt for a complete reform of Swedish language on behalf of this mix-up. Apparently, linguists devising/accepting this shortening of gratulera were particularly drunk or very high on some other organic substance, when they accepted this word as an official Swedish word. No such thing ought to be allowed, since it makes life for us foreigners in Sweden unnecessarily complicated.
Next time I go to any kind of celebration of a Swede, I will make sure that I will give him/her/them my ‘gratULERA’ and not anything else for free!
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