Chickadees name in Sweden

Søren Krarup Olesen sko at inducks.org
Fri Sep 28 09:11:33 CEST 2007


Elin Pettersson wrote:
>  
> Yeas I thought of this also but hesitated to draw the line between the 
> chickadees and biker chicks :)
> Is there a possiblity that the thought of the other meaning of "spätta" 
> occured to the translators?
> I gave the swedish name a lot of thought yesterday and Im still fascinated.

Couldn't it be that since the Danish "Grønspætte" (=Junior Woodchuck)
already existed when they were about to give a Swedish name to the
Chickadees, they just used that ("Danish") word. There is not any
significant phonetic difference between "spætte" (da) and "spätta" (se).

In Danish we also have a "Rødspætte", which in principle could translate
to "Red Woodpecker", only it doesn't. Instead it is the flounder (fish)
that was mentioned earlier on, a relative small, flat type with red
dots. However, that is the only Danish "spætte" which is a fish, the
rest are woodpeckers, while in Sweden they are all fish, so in order to
make it a bird(!?) you used "Gröngölingarna". Luckily "gölingarna" has
no meaning in Danish--that would have been too much! :-)

Søren
(who hopes that "Rödspätta" in Swedish isn't a bird)




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