> From: tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...>
>
> On the subject, heard this actual story on Swedish TV:
>
> American driver: "Where do you guys come from?"
> Pair of hitchhikers: "Sweden!"
> "What kind of language do you speak there?"
> "Swedish"
> "Swedish? Is that a language?"
> Puzzled pause.
> "But you think in English, right?"
>
> Torsten

--- In Nostratica@yahoogroups.com, "Gerry" <waluk@...> wrote:
> Help Torsten (or is it Tarzan),
>
> I don't get the joke.
>
> Could you add a hint or three?
>
> Gerry

Your reaction excellently illustrates the point of the joke.
It is this:
Fact: Everybody thinks in his first language.
Examples:
English people think in English
French people think in French
and (surprise!):
Swedish people think in Swedish (which is a language, yes).

I know this might be a shock to you.
I suppose the confusion comes from the habit in American English of
calling Americans of Swedish descent Swedes etc. I had people tell me
in the USA that they were Danish, but they spoke no Danish. That, in
my definition, is not a Dane. It is an American of Danish (and
probably much else) descent.
The English I know I learned in school. If I hadn't I wouldn't know
any English now.
In my language (and probably any language other than American
English) people make a distinction between "I speak language X" (of
their first language) and "I can speak language Y" (of languages
learned later at school etc). With that use, a citizen of the USA
might say "I speak English" and "I can speak Spanish". But they
don't. It's all: "I speak <such and such a language>. Which if a
person from abroad in the US says: "I can speak English", meaning he
learned five words of it twenty years ago, an American understands it
as: "He speaks English" and proceeds on that faulty assumption.

As for the use of English in Scandinavia, almost everyone "can speak"
English, but everyone "speaks" his national language (Swedish,
Danish, Norwegian). No one here speaks English unless forced to by
circustances (eg a non-Danish-speaking, but English-speaking person
in the audience), and then out of courtesy. Or they might borrow an
expression on occasion from English, but that doesn't make them
English-speaking any more than you saying eg. "mi casa, su casa"
would make you Spanish-speaking.

And, yes, I think in Danish, unless of course as now when I'm writing
something in English.

Torsten