Swedish uncles and a short reply to David

[Mattias Hallin]

DAVID:

      Did I think you were still working for Disney? No, maybe not, if I had
any firm hypothesis on this subject at all; but you HAVE worked for them, and
1992 is not too way back, is it, and you DO work for Egmont presently, right?
Which, I guess,is why I directed that closing question in my last posting to
you as well as Don.

Well, you did ask, you know...

DON:

    About those Swedish uncles. Well, first of all I wholeheartedly agree with
Per, that of course the American version has top priority, and also that
there's no reason (nor any possible way!) for you to try to take into
consideration all various languages that your work is or might be translated
into... There just ain't no way they can all be reconciled!

Anyway, I don't think the reason(s) why Donald and $crooge became paternal
uncles in the Swedish translation has much to do with sexism, or similar, but
with a) ignorance, and b) Swedish idiom.

Ignorance: there was (almost) no possible way for a Swedish schoolteacher (Axel
Norbeck, the first Swedish translator of Donald Duck) in 1948 to know that HD&L
were the children of Donald's sister. The words of the comic he had to
translate (The Fireman Donald WDC) gives no clue - "nephew" and "uncle" being
neutral words - and for Norbeck to have seen AND remembered the ONE Taliaferro
strip from which we extrapolate the relationship, that's asking a bit much.
Sure, he might have seen the cartoon, just possibly, but to remember a factoid
like this for almost 10 years? Not likely. And even had he known - what bloody
difference was he supposed to believe it would make, any ol' way?

Swedish idiom: as I've explained before, the word "farbror" (from "far"=father
and "bror"=brother) has two meanings in Swedish: one giving an exact
relationship - the brother of my father, the other meaning more or less "male
elder person", or "male person, older than myself, to whom I'm not necessarily
specifically related, but whom I want to treat with a certain amount of
respect". Where in English a mother might say to her child: "say thank-you to
the nice man" a Swede might say "s{g tack till den sn{lle FARBRORn" without
implying any relationship by blood or marriage.

This does not so for the word "morbror" (from "mor"=mother etc.), which can
ONLY mean your mother's brother and nothing else.

Why, then, is this so? Well, I'm no linguist, but I think one reason is that
the word "farbror" contains two male words, but the word morbror only one; and
this might be one reason why the first is used in two contexts.

There is more that could be said on the subject, but it's back to work for me
now...

Mattias