Robert’s WebLog

The German “Tanz-metall” band Rammstein is one of my favorite bands. This is one of their best songs according to me.
The theme of this song is nightmares. I like the music and the lyrics. It always gives me an adrenaline kick.

 Lyrics with translation

There are better recordings. But I like this one the most.

He says things he can’t understand. He’s in jail. Will he be released? Nah. Don’t think so.

This is a brief presentation of my mothertongue.

The Swedish language is a North Germanic language spoken primarly in Sweden and some parts of Finland. It has its origin in Old Norse, like Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic.

The Swedish language is closely related to Danish and they are both classed as East Scandinavian languages. The other languages are West Scandinavian. A person who speaks Swedish can communicate with people that are speaking Norwegian and with some difficulties even Danish-speakers. Due its influences from Low German during the Hansa trading era it has, like the Danish language, borrowed a lot of words. However, the pronounciation and spelling of these words differs a lot. The pronunciation is more similar to Norwegian (nynorsk) and it retains many other North Germanic features you find in the for example Icelandic (very close to Old Norse).

Influences

Many words come directly from Old Norse, but some are mainly borrowed from other languages, like German, Latin, Greek and of course English.

Structure

Swedish is less inflected than for example German and Icelandic, and similar to the other Scandinavian languages. It has two genders (or four) and no grammatical cases (older definition is Nominative and Genitive). The definiteness is marked by adding suffixes complemented by eithert definite or indefinite article in some cases. The same principles occur in Danish and Norwegian.

Declensions

These are two examples of declensions of words in the two existing genders in Swedish. The plurals may differ but the singular pattern usually stay the same. These are not the only declensions. There are five declensions,

Common

en vacker kvinna - a beautiful woman
den vackra kvinnan - the beautful woman
flera vackra kvinnor - many beautiful women
de vackra kvinnorna - the beautiful women

Articles en (a) and den (the/it) and suffix -n /-en are typical features of the common gender.

Neuter

ett stort hus - a big house
det stora huset - the big house
flera stora hus - many big houses
de stora husen - the big houses

Articles ett (a) and det (the/it) and suffix -et are typical features of the neuter gender.

Verbs

Verbs are also quite simple because there is just one form in each tense. These forms must of course be accompanied with a personal pronoun.

att springa - to run

Present: spinger - run/runs/is running
Preterite: sprang - ran
Past: har sprungit - have/has run
Future: kommer att/ska springa - will/ist going to run

There are other conjugations and compound tenses but this example is just to show you so you get an idea of how it is working.

This was a short introduction to the Swedish language. There are of course much more, but this shows that it is not a hard language to learn.

You find more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_language.

Cheers!

Here’s a webcomic about things I like!

http://xkcd.com/

I googled around the Internet and by accident I found a really funny page on languages. The page is full of quotes on languages. I really enjoyed reading them. Here’s some of my favorites!

Italian is essentially English with vowels added to the ends of words.
Lombard is essentially Italian with vowels removed from the ends of words.
Ergo, Lombard is essentially English.

–And Rosta/Marco Cimarosti

Italian is what happened when Romans tried to learn Latin and said “screw it.”

–Charles Lavergne

French is essentially Latin spoken by a drunken Roman soldier.

–Elliotte Rusty Harold

All Romance languages are essentially the same. Except French.

–Andreas Johansson

Swiss German is German spoken with a Swedish accent.

–Frann Michel

Swedish is essentially the strangest dialect of Dutch I ever heard.

–Christophe Grandsire

Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are actually the same language. It’s just that the Norwegians can’t spell it, and the Danes can’t pronounce it.

–Chlewey

Danish is essentially Swedish spoken while eating porridge.

–Peter Landgren

Old English is essentially mispronounced Modern English spoken while wearing armor and carrying a roundshield and sword.

–Dan Seriff

English is essentially bad Dutch with outrageously pronounced French and Latin vocabulary.

–Eugene Holman

English is essentially Norse as spoken by a gang of French thugs.

–Benct Philip Jonsson

You’ll find more on: http://mercury.ccil.org/~cowan/essential.html

This has been my project for the last two weeks. Here’s the .NET library bundled with documentation. Feel free to use it in your own projects.

Grid grid = new Grid(10, 10);
grid[3, 9] = 25;

Download: http://www.mediafire.com/?jg1ox2xbngw

 This algorthm walks a two-dimensional array (eg. a grid)  row by row.

            //Grid
            int height = 10;
            int width = 10;
            char[,] array = new char[width, height];

            //Position
            int y = 1; //y position
            int x = 1; //x position   

            while (y <= height)
            {
                while (x <= width)
                {
                    array[y - 1, x - 1] = item; //Assign
                    x++;
                }
                y++;
                x = 1;
            }