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Pop Songs Written by Native Speakers of Swedish
- Numberwang 8y agoAs a Swede I really enjoyed reading this. It's not easy to pay attention to the idioms of a foreign language, especially when they are sort of jumbled up in your mind with all the Swedish ones. But it's just to drive on.
- sverige 8y ago> But it's just to drive on. I'm American but I understood what you meant haha! Pop and rock lyrics are mostly not worthy of rational attention.
- StavrosK 8y agoThat's why these are my favorite lyrics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1qKv-kaYEk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1qKv-kaYEk
- nabla9 8y agoFinnish Rock band Hurricanes and their "Get On" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGCviZAdxeY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGCviZAdxeY it is not possible to assign a sensible meaning to the lyrics. This situation arose from the deficient knowledge of English by the singer, Remu Aaltonen. The words were supposed to be replaced later by proper English, and Remu’s words were only meant for a demo recording. However, the other members of the band, as well as the producer, thought that the delivery was strong, and decided to stick to those words, despite opposition from Remu Aaltonen. The unique words are part of the charm of the song.
- jpatokal 8y agoNit: Finnish rock band Hurriganes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurriganes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurriganes Finns often confuse c, g and q (none of which feature in native Finnish words) and the band name itself reflects that! (And while they probably didn't consider this back in the 1970s, it's also good SEO.)
- nabla9 8y agoTIL. I'm a Finn and slightly dyslectic. I didn't realize that the band name was misspelling until now.
- zaxomi 8y ago"But it's just to drive on." = "Det är bara att köra på." Was that intentional?
- Numberwang 8y agoYep
- moogly 8y agoA couple of friends and I used to try to one-up each other in constructing asinine Swenglish idioms. I believe the ultimate winner was: "Who are you for one? I feel again you."
- Numberwang 8y agoHaha that is brilliantly painful to read.
- StavrosK 8y ago> The only way someone speaks more than one language is if that person’s parents speak different languages. That is patently false. The author only thinks that because he doesn't speak more than one language. It's eminently possible to speak a second language even if your parents don't, it just takes more effort than the average person is willing to expend.
- flak48 8y agoIt's very common to speak up to 3 or 4 languages very fluently in India - maybe English, your mother tongue, whatever the regional language is and maybe Hindi. It's very possible all of the last three are Hindi, but rare. Also very rare for anyone too speak just one language. Two is the norm.
- OskarS 8y agoYeah, it's an absurd claim. Ever hear of Vladimir Nabokov? It is certainly true that most people who are bilingual aren't idiomatically fluent in both languages, but it's silly to say that it's impossible. Of course it's possible.
- kingofpandora 8y agoIt's clear that the author isn't meant to be taken literally here but is using hyperbole it make a point. But perhaps you don't speak English fluently ;)
- StavrosK 8y agoOr perhaps you don't ;)
- aaronharnly 8y agoThe author's intended meaning, in context, is I think: "the only way someone speaks more than one language [without occasionally getting caught by tricky corners of usage or idiom]." I still agree with you that it's overstrong, but read charitably they simply meant that language is ever sneaky.
- Kudos 8y agoThat even applies to variants of English. I'm Irish, so I speak Hiberno-English. After the company I worked for was acquired by a California startup my new boss wanted to welcome this new Irish contingent. At the tail end of a keynote speech he delivered at our first off-site he uttered the phrase "build great shite". He tried to put an Irish slant on things, except the word shite only has negative connotations, it is not a general substitute word like shit can be.
- aswanson 8y agoHilarious.
- estomagordo 8y agoLet's get shite faced!
- evincarofautumn 8y ago“Great” also doesn’t help in this case, since in Hiberno-English (at least to my American ear) it sounds emphatic, not descriptive—that is, “shite” = “shitty stuff”, “great shite” = “extremely shitty stuff”.
- sonnyblarney 8y agoWhat's amazing about Abba is not only are the tunes instantly memorable ... so are the lyrics. I don't remember the lyrics to anything and yet those pop right out at us. Maybe even more-so than the Beatles.
- mynameishere 8y agoAnd if I meet you, what if I eat you? I am the tiger! Hey, you're right.
- didymospl 8y agoMore recent example is Hit me baby, one more time by Britney Spears: >Turns out, it's not any form of physical abuse or kinky S&M or even a metaphor relating to those -- it's all one big misunderstanding. >Swedish writers Max Martin and Rami Yacoub believed that "hit" was American slang for "call." https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop-shop/6753845/hit-me-baby-one-more-time-nsync-star-meaning-revealed https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop-shop/6753845/... And the fact that it's another mistake made by Swedish writers shouldn't make you think they are bad at English, but rather make you wonder how many successful writers/producers of pop music come from Sweden.
- colanderman 8y agoHuh. I always figured it was a blackjack metaphor, about pushing one's luck.
- binomialxenon 8y agoYeah, that was my impression too. Giving the song more credit than it deserves, but I suppose that's Death of the Author.
- evincarofautumn 8y agoWhereas I thought it was like the blackjack metaphor you might use at a bar for “give me another drink”—the singer wants another “hit” of her ex-lover, as if they were a drug, because her loneliness is “killing her” like withdrawal. In fact I thought it was a thinly veiled song about drugs, framed as about love.
- logfromblammo 8y agoI also initially read it as drugs, and "your love is like heroin" in particular, being both self-destructive and highly addictive.
- nerdponx 8y agophysical abuse or kinky S&M or even a metaphor relating to those Did people seriously think that's what the song was about? Their understanding of English is fine, they just underestimated the paranoid creativity of the American cultural reactionary.
- Johnny555 8y ago"The chorus of the song goes... "All that she wants is another baby.." The intended meaning was “All that she wants is another lover... But of course, no native speaker of English understood it that way. We all thought the song was taking this really surprising angle: “All that she wants is to get pregnant." Is this true? I never had such confusion about this song, and the Wikipedia page for it doesn't mention it. It seems more likely that a non-native English speaker would have misinterpreted the lyric -- lyrics often don't intend the literal meaning of the words and the use of "baby" as "lover" is pretty widely known.
- cossatot 8y agoI always thought it was about babies, and I'm a native English speaker.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- adventured 8y agoIt's blatantly false and bizarre as a claim. I grew up during the early pop 90s, and rather drowned in that culture day to day (it was still peak MTV). It's far more likely that few people thought it referred to having a baby. If it had been taken to mean having a baby, the song never would have charted. Referring to someone as their baby romantically, was and is extremely common. It was routinely referenced in R&B songs at that time as well. I don't see how it could have been missed.
- Moru 8y agoIn Sweden there was a radio program where you could call in and report what misunderstandings you or a friend had of songs and they would riducule you no end. There are a lot of weird misunderstandings thanks to just not listening properly or the vocals being very unclear. Or just pronounced strange so they fit into the melody.
- 8y ago
- dkarl 8y agoBut of course, no native speaker of English understood it that way. We all thought the song was taking this really surprising angle: “All that she wants is to get pregnant. I know this is a little off-topic from the point of the article, but I think this is a very sophisticated take on the song! In my less sophisticated world, people in my community who got pregnant were never "gone tomorrow." There was no unexpected "goodbye." If the result was not marriage, there was always child support, interference with subsequent relationships, various threats of violence both ways, and/or a perpetual public argument about the sufficiency of the father's involvement. Based on what I saw around me, the "she's trying to get pregnant and then disappear" interpretation of the song just didn't make any sense, so I had a good immature teenage snicker over it but never doubted that "baby" meant "lover," never thought it was intended as a double-entendre, and never thought that the accidental double-entendre gave the song any extra depth. This is the first I've heard that people actually took it to be the intended meaning of the song! (Though with broader experience now I can see it's a viable interpretation.)
- ajuc 8y agoI'm quite sure you can speak several languages on a native level, and you don't have to learn all of them when you're a kid. My counterexample is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Conrad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Conrad BTW I don't consider myself a fluent English speaker (mostly because of my awful pronunciation), but all of the problems with ABBA songs specified in the article were clear to me. I was just never bothered by it, because songs by native English speakers have weird or even ungrammatical lyrics, too.
- schoen 8y agoI wanted to mention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Nabokov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Nabokov (a Russian writer who became famous for his incredibly creative mastery of English), but Wikipedia says that he spoke English with his family as a child so maybe it can't be considered a foreign language for him.
- FabHK 8y agoNabokov's mastery of English is incredibly impressive. It pays to read the annotated versions of his classics, because it's nearly impossible to catch all the allusions and word plays he employs. I still wonder whether he could be caught out (as a non-native speaker) by something as simple as lullabies or so.
- poisonarena 8y agoI moved to latin america at age 30 and started learning spanish. Now fluent several years later.
- cossatot 8y agoI've always felt that First Aid Kit, who have mastered American country-folk musical styling, lay it on a bit thicker than necessary with idioms. It's a bit like someone showing up to a cowboy bar wearing spurs.
- projectramo 8y agoOstensible English speakers make similar mistakes when writing pop songs. Consider Justin Timberlake in Rock Your Body. The chorus goes: “Got time, but I don't mind Just wanna rock you, girl I'll have whatever you have Come on let's give it a whirl” But the issue is: got time but I don’t mind. Well, why would you mind if you had the time? It should be “don’t have time but I don’t mind” or else “got time and I don’t mind” Drives me nuts!
- aswanson 8y agoThe beat is straight. Just dance.
- indecisive_user 8y agoI thought that was an interesting mistake to make since it really doesn't make a lot of sense. After looking around, it seems every website reports the lyric as "Got time" but according to JT, he actually says "Guy time". https://twitter.com/THETNKIDS/status/978655880400068608 https://twitter.com/THETNKIDS/status/978655880400068608 Anyway, that's not to say that native English speakers don't use gibberish or awkward phrases just to make a line sound nice, just that in this case it seems to be a lyric misunderstanding
- technofiend 8y agoYou're barking up the wrong tree Yeah and you're scratching for a bone You triggered all of my words Just to see all of your curves Knock knockin up the prom queen She had to shake it, won't die mean Written by a native English speaker, but still as a native speaker myself I wouldn't swear I know exactly what that last line means.
- masklinn 8y agoAre you sure the author/producer of that song was a native english speaker? > Today, Karl "Max" Martin [Sandberg] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin) is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Swedish producers. The likes of Klas Åhlund (Kylie Minogue, Robyn, Madonna), Shellback (Usher, One Direction, Taylor Swift, Icona Pop) and Martin Terefe (Westlife, James Blunt, KT Tunstall) have regularly produced international chart-topping hits in the last few years. Swedes have also recently conquered the world of J-pop and K-pop. The Swedish Pop Machine is a very very real thing.
- lalos 8y agoThere is also this one, with lyrics that barely make any sense at all also by Max Martin I believe. https://www.laweekly.com/music/what-the-hell-is-backstreet-boys-i-want-it-that-way-about-update-mind-blowing-shit-has-come-to-light-2411586 https://www.laweekly.com/music/what-the-hell-is-backstreet-b...
- Agentlien 8y agoAs a Swede I've definitely noticed a lot of these things in Swedish pop music. It's fun if a bit embarrassing. What currently annoys me, though, is that there's this one mistake which always stands out when I hear it, but now I can't remember what it was. I thought it was in an ABBA song, but after going through their lyrics I can't spot it. It's an international hit by a Swedish band in any case. One in which a Swedish idiom is translated word by word and ends up meaning something entirely different.
- zaxomi 8y agoCould it be "Take on me" with the Norwegian band "A-ha" from 1984? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djV11Xbc914 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djV11Xbc914 "Take on me" translated word for word will be "ta på meg" (Norwegian) or "ta på mig" (Swedish), meaning "touch me".
- Agentlien 8y agoThat wasn't the one I meant, but this one has also bugged me a lot!
- wingerlang 8y agoIf we're translating it word for word, they also say "Take me on" which makes sense in english, but not in Swedish. EDIT: Maybe in Norwegian it does, at least they offer an explanation here https://genius.com/10492339 https://genius.com/10492339
- ahje 8y agoNative Swedish speaker here. I've always interpreted it to be about actual babies.
- mattbierner 8y agoOne of Italo’s many charms is that you can often tell what the singer meant to say in English but the actual meaning is quite different or often just odd. Unlike the Swedish song writers mentioned here, I suspect many Italo artists knew only basic English, which they learned from song lyrics or movies or something. This mimicry produced great songs—arguably much more disco disco than what came out of the states, sort of like why spaghetti westerns are the best westerns—and it also holds up a mirror to the original culture and material
- wodenokoto 8y agoI have never heard of italo before, but it appears to be a subgenre of disco. Can you name a few "classic" hits one might know?
- namdnay 8y agoYo listen up, here's the story About a little guy that lives in a blue world And all day and all night and everything he sees is just blue Like him, inside and outside Blue his house with a blue little window And a blue Corvette And everything is blue for him And himself and everybody around 'Cause he ain't got nobody to listen to
- wodenokoto 8y agoI'm blue da ba dee da ba dai?
- toasterlovin 8y agoI don’t have any particular recommendations, but if you want to explore, use the search term “Italo disco”, rather than “Italo”. YouTube can take you on a nice tour.
- mbroncano 8y agoLady of Ice by fancy is a good start
- poisonarena 8y ago
- estomagordo 8y agoAs a Swedish person, this was a delightful read. Even if I don't care much for the particular songs analyzed here. When I hear these types of slip-ups or mistakes from Swedish song-writers, I tend to either cringe a little (i.e. Jenny Wilson's "It's ok, come on, I won't do the things they learned me" from Let My Shoes Lead Me Forward), or find it to be delightfully naïve (i.e. "I called you, she answered Got strangled on the way" from The Concretes "New Friend"). Very much a question of personal preference, of course. But I never really thought of the Ace of Base in the pregnancy context. Humbling for me for sure.
- evincarofautumn 8y agoI’m not familiar with the song, but going by lyrics alone, “I won’t do the things they learned me” is accidentally spot-on for native speakers of some dialects of English where “learn” can also mean “teach”, e.g., “That’ll learn him to mess with me!” (= “That will teach him that he shouldn’t mess with me”). To native speakers in general, it comes off as adding a bit of old-fashioned/country flavour.
- estomagordo 8y agoThanks for pointing that out. As much as I pick up aspects of an English dialect here or there, I'm sure there are many more similar things I just don't know. If I heard a native speaker say the above, I would assume they were a bit uneducated, that it's a sociolect kind of thing.
- pimmen 8y ago> "Now I don’t know what they do to teach English to Swedish children, but whatever it is, anybody can see they do an excellent job." Stop. Dubbing. Media. I'm a big lover of cinema and every time I visit France, Germany or Spain they ruin classic movies by doing this shit. Just imagine the poor director who worked many hours to coach the actors to deliver a moving, terrific performance that hits just the right notes watch how people with a completely different culture and language botch it. Why do this? Everyone has an incentive to learn English if you stop with this, especially children.
- yoz-y 8y agoPretty much this. I believe that the main advantage smaller countries have (or maybe, had) in learning English is that the movies/games just weren't translated. If I wanted to watch Two Stupid Dogs or play Fallout, the only option was English.
- Fnoord 8y ago"Now if there are any major ABBA psychopaths reading this, I know what you’re thinking [...]" The choice of the word 'psychopath' is rather ironic given the context (whole article's narrative). The writer meant the word 'fan' or a synonym of that.
- Moru 8y agoThe unintended mistakes in speaking/writing in another language is like a fingerprint of what country you originate from. I used to play a lot on old roleplaying servers and started noticing things that certain nationalities do with words. I'm from Sweden and could pick out germans pretty consistently. Germany has a funny kids program that plays a sample in german and a foreign language while showing videoclips. You are supposed to guess what language it is. Pretty fun to get a feel for the sound-picture of a language :-)
- evincarofautumn 8y agoIt’s cool how you can pick up someone’s “accent” online in that way. A spoken accent is often a dead giveaway if you have some idea of the phonology of their native language. The way a lot of people learn the sounds of a foreign language in the first place is by “transliterating” them to their native language—so they never quite pick up the foreign sounds exactly, just the nearest approximation from their native array of sounds. But even if you can’t hear them, the mistakes and idiosyncrasies of their writing are going to be influenced by their native language as well, in fairly predictable ways. Of course now that I’m trying to think of examples, I can’t recall any. :P
- habeebtc 8y agoIncredibly true! There's a lot of shibboleths, odd turns of phrase, that come from people translating their thoughts literally into another language. Japanese > English for example, you'll hear people say things like, "What are you doing from now?" It's also very common to mix up articles, so I hear a lot of things being inflected very definitely, but they will use the indefinite article. Ex: "That band is great, but the singer is a problem." Grammatically correct, but a shade of meaning to the left of what they were trying to say.
- Nr7 8y ago> “Waterloo! / I couldn’t escape if I wanted to.” You wouldn’t think foreigners would be able to come up with that. Wow, condescending much?
- tomcam 8y agoTo me it felt like genuine appreciation. I can fake it for a bit in several languages but writing pop songs in them would feel like a massive achievement.
- Nr7 8y agoIt's a backhanded compliment. I agree that the author thinks he showing appreciation but that is insulting. It's the same inherent condescension that I've seen a lot of Americans show towards foreigners.
- fapjacks 8y agoLiterally ten percent of American pop culture is one hundred percent Swedish. I married a Swede and it gave me an opportunity to see that there is an incredibly tight feedback loop between Sweden and the States, in some incredibly particular ways. Music is one of them. Edited to add that I typed this up wearing the hat I usually wear on another site, so I don't mean "literally" literally, but more like "seriously".
- jernfrost 8y agoThese mistakes don’t just run from native language to foreign language. Any time you know more than one language you will end up screwing up the other in some way. I am a native Norwegian speaker and it annoys me how many things we say in Norwegian adopted from english which makes no sense in Norwegian. We translate the english: “let us go for it” to “la oss gå for det” but that literally means “let us walk for it” I got bilingual kids and they screw up both languages. Norwegian grammar sneaks into english and english grammar and idioms sneak into their Norwegian. Neithet language is really spoken correctly
- majewsky 8y agoSame in German. A lot of people say "Das macht Sinn", which is a literal translation of "That makes sense." But "Sinn machen" is implausible in German because "machen" is more like "to manufacture". I used to get worked up over it, but I talked to a linguist about it and he encouraged me to just let it go: That's just how languages develop.
- germanier 8y agoYou might be interested in this five-part series on this expression that meticoulsy lays out that (even though it might be an import from English) it fits perfectly well into how such expressions are constructed in German and it isn't really implausible (especially in the third post). https://www.iaas.uni-bremen.de/sprachblog/2007/10/01/sinnesfreuden-i/ https://www.iaas.uni-bremen.de/sprachblog/2007/10/01/sinnesf...
- jacobush 8y agoI wonder if English and Norwegian is even easier to mess up between them, than say Swedish and English. I have often thought that English and Norwegian seem closer to each other than Swedish and English, even though Norwegian and Swedish also are very very similar. I am thinking of things like "great" and "accurate" and a lot of other words which are basically the same in Norwegian and English. There are a lot of cognates between English and Swedish too of course, but often you have traverse the language a bit farther to find the root, and often there are subtle differences in meaning. Purblind being my current favorite - meaning completely blind in Swedish and the same in English - but only archaic language! In contemporary English it apparently means "partly blind". Besided, I really wonder about your example. "Låt gå för det" is a totally Swedish expression, AFAIK it's not translated from English. To my ears, it's a bit archaic, which would rather suggest that this idiom has a common germanic parent for both English and Swedish. Remember, English got a LOT of its shape from Old Norse. (From Norwegians and Danes.)
- avadeaux 8y agoThe most blatant English error I noted in Abba lyrics is saying ‘funny’ when they mean ‘fun’. This happens twice: “Must be funny in the rich man's world” and “You can dance with me honey, If you think it's funny”. There are at least a couple of words in Swedish (‘roligt’, ‘kul’) that can are used both meaning fun/pleasant/enjoyable and funny/amusing/hilarious, so Swedes sometimes confuse them.
- Steve44 8y ago> “Must be funny in the rich man's world” I'd always taken that to be it must be odd being in a rich man's world with all that money if you're not used to it. The lifestyle, choices and pressures are so different. It never occurred to me it meant it was fun. I've never studied the lyrics so there is a good chance I've missed the point anyway.
- mbroncano 8y agoA lot of those mistakes are common in ‘continental’ English speakers to be fair. Sensible vs. sensitive etc. are such a common source of confusion.
- wodenokoto 8y agoThe author greatly underestimates the native speakers potential for screwing up song lyrics, but other than that, these are fun examples. Looking at Scandinavian songs that didn't become international hits, we have a lot more, much worse examples :)
- wodenokoto 8y agoLil Yachty is an American rapper, who poetically sang "She blow that dick like a cello"
- gberger 8y ago> The author greatly underestimates the native speakers potential for screwing up song lyrics I think what's interesting is how it's often possible to trace a mistake back to a word or idiom in the speaker's native language. For example, a poster elsewhere in the thread pointed out how ABBA confuses 'fun' and 'funny', which can be explained by there existing words in Swedish that mean both things.
- DeBraid 8y agoEvokes the Swedish band `Millencolin` which had a knack for consistently delivering great songs with simple lyrics. Were awesome live because everyone would sing along. > Millencolin is a punk rock band that was formed in October 1992 by Nikola Šarčević, Mathias Färm, and Erik Ohlsson in Örebro, Sweden. In early 1993, drummer Fredrik Larzon joined the band. The name Millencolin is derived from the skateboard trick "melancholy".[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millencolin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millencolin
- clay_to_n 8y agoFirst Aid Kit is a Swedish band with some really great lyrics. One song that's intrigued me with it's ambiguity is Emmylou, which contains the line: Stockholm's cold but I've been told I was born to endure this kind of weather Is she predisposed to be okay with cold climates, or was she born so that her parents could handle the cold? I'll be your Emmylou and I'll be your June If you'll be my Gram and my Johnny too No, I'm not asking much of you Just sing little darling, sing with me Romantic love or parental love? Is she saying the last line, or is it her parents talking to her? Wonderful stuff.
- spiralx 8y ago> Is she predisposed to be okay with cold climates, or was she born so that her parents could handle the cold? The second meaning doesn't make any sense, you could say "I was born to fulfil this destiny" for instance, because there's only one subject in the sentence, the singer. > Romantic love or parental love? "I'll be your X" is a clear indication of romantic love... > Is she saying the last line, or is it her parents talking to her? Where do her parents come into this? There's no ambiguity at all here: the singer isn't asking much of the person they're singing about, only that they sing along with them. Given that the song is about famous country and western stars, two of which were married while the other two almost became a couple but one died before it might have happened, it seems like you've read ambiguity into it where there isn't any, and used it to fill in your own interpretation. Which I'm sure we all do at times.