”A GLASS AND GLASS-THE”

”A GLASS AND GLASS-THE”

Swedish uses two separate indefinite articles, both equivalent to the English a(n), en andett. The former is used with en-words and the latter with ett-words, hence the names of the two groups.

When it comes to the definite form, it gets weird.

Swedish does not use a separate article like English the, instead, we add an ending to the word in question. Guess which one!

en-words take -en and ett-words take -et.

However, we do not like to have two vowels next to each other (we just think it sounds wrong). So should the word end in a vowel, we just add the corresponding consonant.

SOMETIMES WE DROP THE LAST -E- OR -A- IN THE WORD (E.G. “EN GAFFEL” – “GAFFELN”) BUT YOU DON'T NEED TO WORRY ABOUT THAT QUITE YET!

Examples

Indefinite singular	Definite singular
en sked a spoon	skeden the spoon
ett glas a glass	glaset the glass

Fågeln och spindeln

Hmm... did you spot the definite article at the end? Looks a bit strange, doesn't it? One would have expected "fågelen" and "spindelen". Well, to be honest, you can - in some Swedish regions (in the South for instance).

The en-word endings –el, –en, –er and –ar are very hungry endings so they eat up the following -e-, leaving us with only a consonant.

Examples

Indefinite	Definite
en fågel a bird	fågeln the bird
en spindel a spider	spindeln the spider

A Møøse once bit my sister...

The national animal of Sweden is The King of the Forest, Alces alces, in American English known as the moose. In British English, this animal is called as an elk. Just to make things more complicated, there's an American animal called elk which is not at all the same animal as the moose or what the Brits call an elk, this is Cervus canadensis, also known as a wapiti (in Swedish: en wapitihjort, but we don't have them here). 
Complications don't stop there. The normal plural of both moose and elk is the same as the singular, so that it's one moose, several moose and one elk, several elk. The Swedish word behaves perfectly normal though: en älg, älgen in the singular, and in the plural:älgar, älgarna. 
There are lots of moose in Sweden. The yearly hunt is a big deal, notably the king likes to shoot the big animal. Moose can be a big traffic problem. There are road signs with moose on them to warn for them, these have become a sort of tourist symbol for Sweden, and especially German tourists have been known to steal those signs as souvenirs. Young moose are not shy and often like to enter people's gardens to eat apples. 
There's also usually at least one kid in every school who looks a lot like a moose and is nicknamed The moose. :P