Essentials of Swedish Grammar: A Practical Guide to the Mastery of Swedish
by Ake Viberg, Kerstin Ballardini, Sune Stjarnlof

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Book Reviews of Essentials of Swedish Grammar: A Practical Guide to the Mastery of Swedish

Book Review: Great little Swedish grammar book
Summary: 5 Stars

Swedish is one of the main Germanic family languages, like English. Supposedly, the language closest to modern-day English is Frisian, a northwest German language, and Frisian and English share features that no other members of the family have, according to an article I read once, although they didn't say specifically what they were. But I do recall that Frisians are sometimes the butt of jokes since they're regarded sort of like "Okies" or rural, rustic folk in the U.S.

Anyway, having studied some German I thought I'd try to learn a little about another Germanic family language, and this book was great for that. Swedish grammar is more complex than English in that it is a more highly inflected language, but it's really no worse than German, so if you have some background in that, you'll be fine.

Nouns are declined for number, definiteness vs. indefiniteness, and the nominative and genitive cases. There are five delension patterns depending on the two letters the noun ends with, and a fifth that is just the bare stem word. Adjectives are inflected the same way, and are no longer inflected according to case as in Old Swedish. There are nominative, possessive, and direct object forms for the pronouns.

Comparative and superlative forms in Swedish are pretty much idential to English. Adverbs come in three types, plain adverbs, older noun or adjective case forms (mostly datives) which have survived as adverbs, and neuter adjectives used as adverbs. The last group is easy to form from the indefinite neuter singular adjective, which isn't that difficult.

Swedish verbs fall into one of five conjugations. The first three of are called "weak," because they've undergone reduction historically and lost the older Germanic stem changes. The fourth conjugation is usually referred to as the "strong" conjugation, and the fifth as the "mixed" conjugation (since it has a "strong" imperfect stem, but a "weak" supine). Strong verbs are those that undergo an internal change in the past tenses, such as in sleep, slept, or sing, sang, sung.

Swedish syntax is very similar to English, except for cases when inverted word order is used, similar to what happens in German. Like English, Swedish has some verbs that change their meaning in combination with other words, such as adverbs, as in phrasal verbs, which are constructions like run up a bill, run out of, brush up on, and so on, where the meaning of the word "run" or "brush" changes. Unlike English, but like German, the Swedish adverbs and particles can shift between being used as a verb prefix or as separate words.

Swedish is one language that has been modelled on a computer since it was regarded as being regular enough to create grammatical macros to produce the grammar. I recently came across an example of such a computer program, and so I thought I'd list the macro for the non-modal auxiliary and finite modal verb-phrase formation rule:

(@vp.aux.vp(Aux,V),

vp:[@tense.aspect(TenseAspect), ...]) --? (Aux,

v:[semanticAux=y, arglist=(V,vp:[...]),

@tense.aspect(TenseAspect), ...]) + (V,

vp:[vform=(inf"/supine), ...].

Anyway, not sure I understand that myself but it sure looked cool.

But getting back to the present book, this is a very nice little introduction to Swedish with a concise summary of the grammar and how it differs from English. There are lots of useful example sentences in both Swedish and English, some good vocabulary, and finally, not the least of its virtues is that the price is right.

Summary of Essentials of Swedish Grammar: A Practical Guide to the Mastery of Swedish

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