When you borrow a word form another language, what really integrates it? How do you pluralize or conjugate a foreign word?
In English we do this all the time, and as a french student I would occasionally take and English word and conjugate it as a regular
french verb… half the time it was right.
Swedish has LOTS of ‘loaner-words’ and since so many people are fluent in English, it can get a bit tricky how to integrate these words.
one such word is ‘muffin’, and Swedish Radio has a linguist in this week to discuss how it should be pluralized, and perhaps also gripe about what is the world coming to and how back in his day, people spoke the king’s Swedish!
PS the king eats muffinar.
Cool – the “-ar” plural in nouns is similar to the Old Norse… But the real question has to be whether muffinar can compete with traditional Swedish treats….