--- In cybalist@..., celteuskara@... wrote:
> Dear Torsten
>
>
> AS far as I know luck is alive and well in England too. Don't
people talk like that in Denmark? The people around me are forever
saying "Don't put those new shoes on the table! It's bad luck." Is
this really not the case outside of America and England??
>
>
> Beinn
>
> >Vae victis.
>
Danish "lykke" (and Swedish) "lycka" today mean only happiness. The
meaning "luck" has been taken over in Danish by "held" (and in
Swedish by "tur", as in "your turn now"?). But the meaning is, what
shall I say, much more statistical and event-oriented. You can
be "heldig" in Danish, but it doesn't have the same, should I say,
metaphysical quality as in English. Danish books on the Vikings take
pains to explain the concept of "luck" (or "lykke") in the Viking
world, that it was a personal thing that followed a person, or left
him. I've never seen it in English-writen books on that subject. To
the Anglophonian world, it seems to me, luck is something they live
and breathe.
Torsten