On my way back to Lund after celebrating Hallowe'en at home, I had the pleasure of talking to the English boyfriend of a friend of my sister's. We talked about Sweden and Britain and our different cultures and languages. One thing he found very weird is the lack of a "proper" definite article in Swedish. I tried to explain how we add and change suffixes instead of placing an equivalent of "the" before nouns. We used car ("bil" in Swe, from "automobil" (from Greek autós móbilis)) as an example:
Car - Bil,
The Car - Bilen,
Cars - Bilar,
The Cars - Bilarna.
Swedish is more inflected than English in this sense; our words tend to take on many different forms depending on how they are used. This got me thinking about how common the lack of a definite article marker preceding the noun is. Few (or no?) languages in western Europe has another system - English, French, German, Dutch and Spanish all use an equivalent of "the". The Scandinavian languages, on the other hand, use suffixes to indicate the definite article - and this is also the case in Icelandic, which has a very rich case system. Finnish is so different I dare not try to compare it. If you look at languages in eastern Europe, there are also some really interesting and confusing cases in Hungarian that I would love to have a look at at some point.
The genitive works pretty much the same as in English, though the of-construction is hardly ever used, and there is no apostrophe before the genitive s. Apostrophes are very interesting - I will definitely come back to that soon.
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