Re: Odd construct

John Cowan>Andreas Johansson scripsit:
>
> > Well, you don't need to "hit" something to "slå" it! _Rekordet är 20m -
>om
> > du slår't [slo:rt`] vinner du ett pris._ Or you might want to _slå
>sönder
> > ett glas_ or something. Tho' is hardly a very common thing to say for me
> > either.
>
>And even so, what about hitting a punching bag, or a wall, or a pile of
>boards,
>or something else inanimate of the kind?
The Swedish gender system is essentially the German one, minus the later's
exquisite logic.

Basically, there's two genders - t-gender and n-gender. T-gender words are
typically inanimate, altho' there's exceptions like _barn_ "child". For
n-gender words, I don't know whether the majority are animate or inanimate.
Some n-gender words fall into one of two subcathergories that may be termed
masculine and feminine* - these are normally animate.

The relevancy of this that the Swedish equivalences of the words you mantion
(_slagpåse_, _vägg_, _hög med bräder_) happen to be n-gender, so the
relavant pronoun to contract is _den_ (which can contract to _-'n_ for me),
not _det_. Of course, there's many t-gender things you may want to hit too.

* For many speakers, about the only thing that differenciates these from
normal n-gender word is the relevant personal pronoun - masculine _han_ or
feminine _hon_ instead of _den_. For me there's a pretty marked difference
in that adjectives describing masculine nouns inflect differently in some
cases. For example: _den store mannen_ "the big man" vs _den stora kvinnan_
"the big woman" and _den stora lådan_ "the big box". Cf t-gender _det stora
huset_ "the big house". This'd be standard usage, but I not sure it's
majority usage.

                                              Andreas

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