Re: Danish enigma

From: hfroelandshagen
Message: 36231
Date: 2005-02-11

There is one strange thing about Swedish that I haven't found in
Danish or Norwegian. For mysterious reasons Swedish sometimes have
three finite tenses in subordinate clauses. The auxiliary is dropped
leaving the participle alone, more often with passive than the active
I think.

"...den entydigt visar at 16-åringen med uppsåt dödat 14-åringen"
from
http://svt.se/svt/jsp/Crosslink.jsp?d=22620&a=331963

"Michael Englund kallar beskedet om att spelarna hämtats till förhör
för "chockartat och omtumlande"
from
http://svt.se/svt/jsp/Crosslink.jsp?d=19785&a=332267


Another Enigmatic issue in Scandinavian is the jungle of rules for
promotion of sentence parts to initial position. In this Norw sentence
the subject of the subordinate clause is promoted to the initial
position of the main clause (trigging inversion), thus the
subjunction "at" takes a sentence without a subject.

"Det var ikke det jeg hadde håpet at skulle skje"
"That was not what I had hoped that would happen"

This kind of manipulations are amazingly frequent in spoken Norwegian
(at least in my dialect), and I think it is an acceptable
construction in other Scandinavian languages as well.


A near analogic construction is the double-participle passives. But
it exists primarily in formal written language. In this construction
an object of the subordinate verb is promoted to grammatical subject
of the main verb in the passive.

"Tårnet ble vedtatt restaurert for åtte år siden"
"The tower was decided restored eight years ago"

I think this kind of sentences are ok in Danish but I am not sure
with Swedish. I wonder if it is acceptable in German, this example is
actually taken from a discussion on wether it is found in German and
I was told by many that it wasn't.


Havard

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
>
> Another trouble deponent verb: 'findes' "exist"
> Swedish: finnas, finns, fanns, har funnits
> Danish: findes, findes, fandtes, har erh, hm, what?!
> The periphrastic tenses are simply avoided in Danish.
>
> I must confess to being jealous of the Swedes for having such a
> logical grammar, at least on this point.
>
>
>
> Torsten