Similarities between Swedish and Hindi languages
[An Indian’s observations from her one year in
Sweden]
Sweden is a Nordic, Scandinavian country to the very north of Europe. It
is a land where the sun never sets during summers when sunlight is blindingly
bright, while it is dark throughout the winter days when street lights reflect
off the white snow so much that the entire city starts to look like a
glittering wonderland, augmented by the seasonal municipal decorations for Jul
(Swedish equivalent of Christmas) and Lucia. I hear that only the
night-sky in the very north where Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) dance, tops
the city glitters of Gothenburg, south-west Sweden, where I am based
(Gothenburg can be thought of as the original Goth city)!
Other than the fact that Sweden actually has places named Västerås
(Westeros, a name any viewer of the TV series ‘Game of Thrones’ will identify
with), and this really is ‘The North’, a very interesting fact that I found
amusing is the similarity between Hindi, the official language of India, and
Swedish. Amazingly, even as Swedish is closer to German than to English, one
can note how a Hindi word morphs into a Swedish word which in turn morphs into
English. Let me amuse you with a few examples. Any students or professionals
coming to Sweden from India or going to India from Sweden will find these
observations helping them find more in common here with home than they might
otherwise think.
A word of literal ease – since Hindi is written in Devnagri script,
while Svenska (Swedish name of Swedish language) and English use the
Roman alphabet, I will transliterate and write Hindi too in the Roman script
for ease of printing and reading. I will write Devnagri in brackets.
Let us begin our observations with the Swedish words Svenska and Engelska for Swedish and
English respectively. One cannot help but notice the use of suffix ka in
Swedish very similar to the Hindi ka (का ) which is used to convey belonging. The
word for ‘plate’, tallrik (pronounced as ‘Thaalrik’) in Svenska is strikingly
similar to the Hindi word Thaali (थाली ) for it. However, that is almost all the
closeness one can find between the Swedish food and Indian food J, except that ‘sugar’ also is shakar (शकर ) in Hindi and söcker (pronounced as
‘sakar’) in Svenska. Outside the kitchen, while dresses might differ, the ubiquitous
garment ‘shirt’, called kurta (कुर्ता ) in Hindi is
called skjorta (pronounced as ‘hurta’) in Swedish. The Swedish word for
‘quilt’, täcke (pronounced as ‘tekiya’) becomes the Hindi word for
pillow, takiya (तकिया ). The
similarity goes uncannily on to the words for yes and no – ja (pronounced
‘yau’) and nej (pronounced ‘nai’) in Swedish are the same as haan (हाँ ) and nahi (नहीं ) in Hindi. What more, there is a dialect
of Hindi, called Bundelkhandi, which comes even closer to Swedish, as there
‘yes’ is hao (हओ ), ‘but’ is mano
(मनो ) (which is men
in Svenska) and ‘so’ is so (सो ) (så in Swedish)!
It becomes more interesting when one
notes that the common word ‘and’ in Hindi is aur (और ) which becomes och (pronounced as
‘okh’) in Swedish. The word for ‘day’ in Swedish is dygn (pronounced as
‘din’) which is the exact same as in Hindi, din (दिन )!! With all these similarities and many more
that I would yet be to discover, I like to think that we people of earth, människor
(pronounced as ‘manishur’) in Swedish, manushya (मनुष्य ) in Hindi, are more similar than we think
we are.
शुभ दिन (Shubh Din)!
Med Vanliga
Halsingar!
Divya
