Confessions of A Hapless Monoglot

On how the Swedish for "vegan" took me down a linguistic and grammatical rabbit-hole...

English isn’t necessarily a simple language, but it lacks certain subtleties that other languages seem to have. And if you’re an English speaking monoglot¹ like me, that presents a bit of problem. How can you understand a linguistic concept in another language that your language simply doesn’t possess? You’re already feeling stupid because of only speaking the one language, and then you end up feeling stupider at your inability to understand a fundamental part of what constituent a languages.

And that was once again me yesterday, trying to understand the bottom bit of the menu at my work’s Swedish office’s Christmas party.

But first let’s back up. When I first started travelling to Sweden I learned that the Swedish word for vegan was “vegan”, albeit pronounced vee-GUN rather than VEE-gan.

Except that it wasn’t. Well it wasn’t always.

Confused? I was.

See the thing with English is that we treat grammar like a set of round holes and words like square pegs, and when we want to put a particular word in a particular hole we just ram it in². So I am a vegan (noun) and I eat vegan food (adjective). Meanwhile, I attend workshops (noun) at which we workshop³ ideas (verb).

Not so in most other languages.

So I was with my boss in a Stockholm Indian restaurant (quite nice, but not necessarily authentic -- I doubt blond-haired, blue-eyed waiter had ever been within a hundred miles of Southall, Birmingham, or Bradford⁴) and they had a vegan menu. Or as they put it: vegansk. (Pronounced vee-GUN-sk).

Turned out that there’s two words for vegan in Swedish. The noun is vegan, the adjective is vegansk (and in this case it was the adjective because it was the vegan menu).

All good, until yesterday when I find out there’s a third word for vegan in Swedish, “veganskt” (with a t on the end). I asked my colleague Patrik what the deal with the t was, and basically, well he wasn’t able to explain it to me.

I mean he tried. The whole table tried. But poor stupid monoglot me just couldn’t grasp it⁵.

Eventually, at lunchtime today we tried again, and I think I’ve got it. (I should say that all of this is my layman’s understanding — don’t expect a formal grammatical explanation here).

So…

Vegansk and veganskt are both adjectival forms.

Vegansk is used when the adjective is attached to something.

“Do you have any vegan food?” or “Can I see the vegan menu?”

By contrast, veganskt is used when the adjective is sort of left hanging.

“I eat vegan.”

So you turn a noun into an adjective by suffixing “sk”, if you attaching it to another noun, and “skt”, if you’re leaving it hanging. (Warning: I’m probably horribly oversimplifying this — I don’t speak Swedish and I’m not a linguist).

Now this is where it gets interesting. “I eat vegan” was their example, not mine, and while I’d understand what someone would mean if they said that, it’s not something I’d say. It doesn’t sound quite right for English. I might say “do you have anything that’s vegan?” or “is any of that food vegan?” but there still should be some sort of noun in there (if you treat “anything” as a noun) for the adjective to attach to. I’m not sure that we have this sort of orphaned, nounless adjective in English? (Perhaps because it’s only by attaching a word to a noun that we can tell that it’s an adjective).

But to take a slightly different but parallel example, “I eat kosher” sounds perfectly, well, kosher, to my English-speaking ears.

So why does “I eat kosher” sound fine but “I eat vegan” sound wrong? Well I’m guessing that it’s because “I eat kosher” is an Americanism that I’ve heard in TV and movies. But if so, why is an Americanism?

And this where I have a complete guess… Is this a Yiddish speech pattern, with Yiddish being derived from German, and German presumably having a similar grammatical structure in this regard to Swedish?

(If anyone out there actually knows this, unlike amateur, guessing me, please feel free to comment)!

But there was still a final twist. See vegan (vee-GUN) is a Swedish word, albeit clearly of the loanword variety⁶. You can see this if you play around with Google translate.

Now, you can’t be “a kosher”, but if I try the latter two statements, but with “kosher” rather than “vegan”, you see something interesting.

It’s not “koshersk” and “kosherskt”. It’s just kosher. So while vegan has been assimilated into the Swedish language as a fully Swedish set of words, kosher is a Hebrew word used as is.

I’m not sure why.

1. One who speaks only a single language. Although strictly speaking I do know a handful of words in German, a few in French, and one in Turkish (“Fiş”, pronounced “fish”, which means receipt — and yes, I was on expenses when I travelled to Turkey).

2. I blame the Normans. No really. At some point I’ll do a blog post to explain why. And where did the Normans actually come from?

3. Actually we don’t, because I hate buzzwords like that, but right now, it’s the example that comes to mind.

4. For the avoidance of doubt, this is a joke.

5. And before you ask, I hadn't been drinking.

6. The word vegan is an English word that was created in November 1944 by the founding members of the Vegan Society at their first meeting. Having decided to break away from the Vegetarian Society and create a new group for those who were avoiding eating all animal products, they needed to brainstorm a word to describe themselves. They started with “VEGeTARian”, cut the middle out to get “VEJ-an”, then turned the soft g into a hard g to get “VEGan” and then lengthened the e to get “VEEgan”.