Pop Songs Written by Native Speakers of Swedish | Hacker News Reader

Pop Songs Written by Native Speakers of Swedish

theparisreview.org

135 pointsprostoalex148 comments

"The chorus of the song goes... "All that she wants is another baby.." The intended meaning was “All that she wants is another lover... But of course, no native speaker of English understood it that way. We all thought the song was taking this really surprising angle: “All that she wants is to get pregnant."

Is this true? I never had such confusion about this song, and the Wikipedia page for it doesn't mention it.

It seems more likely that a non-native English speaker would have misinterpreted the lyric -- lyrics often don't intend the literal meaning of the words and the use of "baby" as "lover" is pretty widely known.

I always thought it was about babies, and I'm a native English speaker.

It's blatantly false and bizarre as a claim. I grew up during the early pop 90s, and rather drowned in that culture day to day (it was still peak MTV). It's far more likely that few people thought it referred to having a baby. If it had been taken to mean having a baby, the song never would have charted. Referring to someone as their baby romantically, was and is extremely common. It was routinely referenced in R&B songs at that time as well. I don't see how it could have been missed.

In Sweden there was a radio program where you could call in and report what misunderstandings you or a friend had of songs and they would riducule you no end. There are a lot of weird misunderstandings thanks to just not listening properly or the vocals being very unclear. Or just pronounced strange so they fit into the melody.

There was a series of adverts based on this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gib916jJW1o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxELSzay2lc

Im British and I always thought the song was about wanting a baby (get pregnant)...

I bought the album when it came out, and I certainly thought it meant a child, and so did most people as far as I can tell. After all, that's what it says, and interpreting baby as an endearment would mean the line made no sense given how the term baby is used.

I'm a native Swedish speaker and I always thought they meant having another child. The issue isn't the term "baby" being ambiguous, it's the phrasing.

I was only about ~9 when the song came out and always thought she wanted to get pregnant.

I still thought that up until I read this...now feeling very stupid.

The use of baby as lover is well known, but not when phrased like this. I think its because 'baby' needs to have ownership attributed to it to imply partner.

My sense is that "baby" is a term of endearment that is typically addressed to someone in particular. Similarly, you might express affection for someone by calling them "dear" or "honey," but it would be weird to say "I want a dear" or "I want a honey."

I think thats right, using the slang baby as a direct object is rare but possible. “I shot my baby” e.g., but using it with “another baby” really throws it off because a lover is not something you usually have multiple of at the same time so there is not enough context to resolve the ambiguity and lots of natives default to the wrong meaning.

I always thought they just forgot the comma. "All that she wants is another, baby."

I am an native english speaker that moved to Sweden. I am currently learning swedish and the swedish language doesn't use commas in the same way. I think a comma, even in just the lyrics (or a pause in the song), would have made things clearer.

But the comma would make _baby_ refer to the listener as an addressee of the singer (vocative). That is not the meaning the article says is appropriate. Commas are not put between a determiner and its noun so a comma would give a third meaning, turning _another_ into a pronoun.

Oh now I've misinterpreted this song two times haha. Thanks for the help.

I was in high school in the early 90s and heard this song a bajillion times. To the extent I thought about the meaning of this song lyrics (I tried really hard not to), I always thought it meant child, not lover.

all my extended family on the swedish side had many lovers, and a child with each, so that might be the same thing

I'm a native speaker of English. I lived in Germany in my twenties as a military wife. My general understanding was that having two children in Germany as a single mom was the sweet spot for the benefits system. You were financially better off with two kids and no job than with one kid and no job. (Or so I was told.)

Single American soldiers were generally understood to be targets of local German women hoping to have another child without much risk of long-term entanglement.

So, yes, I took the line literally as "She will sleep with you to intentionally get pregnant and is merely using you as a sperm donor."

All of a sudden I kind of want somebody to make a cover with your text instead.

Second that. There was a program on svt play a couple of years ago in the series ”hitlåtens historia” where the band talked a lot about the song.

Yeah, even if it was "wrong" (really, it's a stretch to call it wrong), though ok, Baby was usually used when you were referring to the person directly, or using a term like "my baby". It's a much smaller poetic licence than what happens in a lot of lyrics composed by native speakers.

I also never had any confusion about that lyric—just figured “another baby” meant “another person to call ‘baby’” (i.e. a lover) and chalked it up to poetic license.

The song is just ambiguous enough to leave you wondering if there's a dual meaning to it. She's clearly out for a one night stand, but maybe she wants an actual baby out of the deal.

And leaving you thinking about it is a neat trick to making the song popular. I find the fact that it was unintentional amusing in it's own right.

Im a native English speaker, and I'm shocked to learn that the writer meant it to mean "lover."

Baby is used for lover, so I can see how it's confusing. Still, I never even considered it.

I actually like it a lot better as a literal "baby." It makes the character in the song more unusual and mysterious.

When I first heard it, I considered both interpretations, and left it ambiguous in my mind. Ambiguity is actually a selling point, in my observation: people shape it in their head to mean whatever they want it to mean. It's just like (alleged) news: if they tell you what you want to hear, you are more likely to tune in again: Confirmation Bias. It's partly why media choice has made the nation more divided.

Wait, I'm confused.

Do native english-speakers intuitively interpret the lyrics as "infant" or as "lover"?

"Babe" is common word for "lover" in many languages, including mine, and I never thought someone would think this upbeat song is about getting pregnant.

As a native I assumed infant.

Another baby lacks the usual possessive and seems doubly ambiguous for a lover.. (Is it a new lover or an additional one?)

Wanting another baby (infant) is both a common phrase from 30 somethings and a kind of warning that fits nicely into a pop song where the audience is treated as having a 16-21 level of maturity. The peer warning about a temptress or other opportunity that is a threat to their irresponsible lifestyle.. "Watch out for that vixen-cougar" was the subtext I was hearing. A little nicer than "she is a man eater"..

The use of “baby” as “lover” other than in direct address or with a possessive (most commonly “my”, which is also implied in direct address; but other possessives are occasionally used, mostly after someone has used the idiom in conversation, either to acknowledge or refute the first speakers possessive claim) is almost never heard in English; yes, the idiom is common, but the idiom is also quite particular in form, as idioms often are.

There's been at least some speculation that the "pregnancy" interpretation was, in fact, completely intentional on the songwriter's part:

http://www.cracked.com/blog/how-90s-pop-band-secretly-sold-n...

As a 13-year-old native English speaker when I first heard the song (around the time it came out), I certainly misinterpreted it. But then, as a kid growing up in a fairly conservative evangelical Christian environment, I wasn't inclined to interpret mainstream pop songs charitably. And those minor chords helped to make it seem dark.

I thought the same thing. I'm a native English speaker and even though I was a kid when the song came out, I understood the lyric correctly. Or maybe it was because I was a kid that I understood it correctly? I don't know, but maybe not the best example.

This was a massive hit when I was in high school, and I was in my "fuck pop music" phase. The main thing that turned me off to it was that she was trying to get pregnant, so TIL. It is amusing that the intended meaning is closer to "all that she wants is another fuckboy"

It was slightly different with Brittney Spears and "Hit Me Baby One More Time". It was pretty apparent that she didn't mean she wanted to be physically abused, but it wasn't clear what she actually meant, and I wasn't going to waste my time trying to figure out the real meaning of a song I didn't want to listen to in the first place.

> The only way someone speaks more than one language is if that person’s parents speak different languages.

That is patently false. The author only thinks that because he doesn't speak more than one language. It's eminently possible to speak a second language even if your parents don't, it just takes more effort than the average person is willing to expend.

The author's intended meaning, in context, is I think: "the only way someone speaks more than one language [without occasionally getting caught by tricky corners of usage or idiom]." I still agree with you that it's overstrong, but read charitably they simply meant that language is ever sneaky.

Maybe so, but I still contend that it's very possible to speak a foreign language while rarely making mistakes. Nobody in my extended environment spoke English when I was growing up, yet I think I'm doing okay. I don't think I'm getting tripped up on idioms all that often, but I may just not be seeing my mistakes.

I stumbled about that part of the article as well, and wonder about it.

"rarely making mistakes" is not enough, though. You can learn English as a second language and be better in the GRE than most others, including native speakers. But:

- Can you sing a few common lullabies? Or cite children's rhymes?

- Do you know the name of Mickey Mouse's dog? (There's the apocryphal story about how this was used as a shibboleth to out Russian spies that had infiltrated the US). Talking of shibboleths, think about how the American spy in "Inglourious Basterds" was outed (and shot) because he signalled "3" by hand in the wrong convention.

- There are probably many more things, like names for household items ("Scheuermittel" = "abrasive detergent") or trees, that you don't know.

It would be interesting to find research on this: Distinguishing native speakers from (excellent) non-native speakers.

I'm inclined to agree with the author's point that you only ever speak one language, if you just take "speak" to be sufficiently comprehensive.

>Do you know the name of Mickey Mouse's dog?

I don't get your point, the name of Mickey Mouse's dog is the same in other languages.

A Soviet spy did not spend their childhood watching Disney morning shows on TV while eating their Disney branded cereal.

So if they learned English ever so well later in life and may be perfectly fluent in the affairs of grown up and important things, they might have missed some crucial lore.

I'm a native English (British) speaker and I never even knew that Mickey Mouse had a dog, let alone what it was called.

I totally agree with the wider point, however.

The weird thing is that he has a dog, Pluto, that behaves like a pet and at the same time his friend Goofy, that's also a dog, behaves like a human. OK, he's a mouse so go figure.

(Spanish speaker, no English until I was 12)

If you think that's crazy, think about Pete. He's been a bear (Oswald era), a cat (Steamboat Willie), and if not a dog, then a very doglike cat (Goof Troop). I'm pretty sure he's canonically a cat, but who can really tell? As one of the largest core Disney characters around, he's Maine Coon, Norwegian Forest, or Siberian, at least.

Which Mr is in the Ice Poles?

Good examples. Many (most?) people never become comfortable in a foreign language. My mom has lived in the US for 30 years (moved here in her 30s) and still finds English exhausting to read. (She was an avid reader before.) My wife picks up languages quickly, has a degree in German literature. She speaks it fluently, but mentioned how tiring it was to speak it all the time when living there.

And yet you _completely_ failed at understanding what the author was saying.

Peoples' definitions of "possible" vs. "impossible" seem to be shifting these days. Like the people who say it's "impossible" to lose weight via diet and exercise when what they really mean is "it's hard and I'm gonna choose not to do it." No, Susan, it's perfectly possible, you just have to actually choose to eat less.

Likewise I know plenty of people who speak more than one language despite not growing up in a bilingual family. I only speak one (human) language myself but that's because I haven't bothered, not because I can't.

Edit: As sibling poster points out, the statement is much more defensible if the intended meaning is "to speak more than one language like a native" which does tend to require growing up among native speakers of the language, although they don't have to be in the family home. I know people whose parents barely speak a word of English, yet they speak it natively because they've grown up in an English-speaking country.

The author does speak more than one language, as he makes clear in the very next sentence.

Not very well, by his own admission. I was using his definition of "speaking".

Agreed -- my wife moved here from an Asian country in her late 20's (with only classroom English education), and she understands most common (and many not so common) English idioms.

One thing she doesn't get is a lot of american humor -- standup comedy is almost entirely lost on her. But that's not because she doesn't understand the words, but it's the cultural situations that she doesn't get.

Oh, and she still doesn't get the American units of measurement -- I've learned to convert from English units to Metric when talking to her because we keep having conversations like: "3/16's of an inch!? That's nonsense, why can't they just say it in mm?"

I can't say I can relate with the standup part, but she's right about the imperial system :P

It's harder to convert from a sane system to a weird system. It feels more like a punishment :-)

The problem is that most people consider only their own system sane.

(Wow, this came out sounding way deeper than I intended.)

It's clear that the author isn't meant to be taken literally here but is using hyperbole it make a point.

But perhaps you don't speak English fluently ;)

Or perhaps you don't ;)

It's very common to speak up to 3 or 4 languages very fluently in India - maybe English, your mother tongue, whatever the regional language is and maybe Hindi. It's very possible all of the last three are Hindi, but rare. Also very rare for anyone too speak just one language. Two is the norm.

Plenty of people in the US are fluent in both Spanish and English. In Europe is even more common, specially in border areas or even in regions like Catalonia or Flandes. Three or more is uncommon but not rare at all.

First hand experience, obviously.

Those are all areas where the parents/environment speak more than one language, though.

Yeah, it's an absurd claim. Ever hear of Vladimir Nabokov?

It is certainly true that most people who are bilingual aren't idiomatically fluent in both languages, but it's silly to say that it's impossible. Of course it's possible.

That even applies to variants of English.

I'm Irish, so I speak Hiberno-English. After the company I worked for was acquired by a California startup my new boss wanted to welcome this new Irish contingent. At the tail end of a keynote speech he delivered at our first off-site he uttered the phrase "build great shite".

He tried to put an Irish slant on things, except the word shite only has negative connotations, it is not a general substitute word like shit can be.

Hilarious.

Let's get shite faced!

“Great” also doesn’t help in this case, since in Hiberno-English (at least to my American ear) it sounds emphatic, not descriptive—that is, “shite” = “shitty stuff”, “great shite” = “extremely shitty stuff”.

The most blatant English error I noted in Abba lyrics is saying ‘funny’ when they mean ‘fun’. This happens twice: “Must be funny in the rich man's world” and “You can dance with me honey, If you think it's funny”. There are at least a couple of words in Swedish (‘roligt’, ‘kul’) that can are used both meaning fun/pleasant/enjoyable and funny/amusing/hilarious, so Swedes sometimes confuse them.

> “Must be funny in the rich man's world”

I'd always taken that to be it must be odd being in a rich man's world with all that money if you're not used to it. The lifestyle, choices and pressures are so different.

It never occurred to me it meant it was fun. I've never studied the lyrics so there is a good chance I've missed the point anyway.

A lot of those mistakes are common in ‘continental’ English speakers to be fair. Sensible vs. sensitive etc. are such a common source of confusion.

More recent example is Hit me baby, one more time by Britney Spears:

>Turns out, it's not any form of physical abuse or kinky S&M or even a metaphor relating to those -- it's all one big misunderstanding.

>Swedish writers Max Martin and Rami Yacoub believed that "hit" was American slang for "call."

https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop-shop/6753845/...

And the fact that it's another mistake made by Swedish writers shouldn't make you think they are bad at English, but rather make you wonder how many successful writers/producers of pop music come from Sweden.

Huh. I always figured it was a blackjack metaphor, about pushing one's luck.

Yeah, that was my impression too. Giving the song more credit than it deserves, but I suppose that's Death of the Author.

Whereas I thought it was like the blackjack metaphor you might use at a bar for “give me another drink”—the singer wants another “hit” of her ex-lover, as if they were a drug, because her loneliness is “killing her” like withdrawal. In fact I thought it was a thinly veiled song about drugs, framed as about love.

I also initially read it as drugs, and "your love is like heroin" in particular, being both self-destructive and highly addictive.

physical abuse or kinky S&M or even a metaphor relating to those

Did people seriously think that's what the song was about? Their understanding of English is fine, they just underestimated the paranoid creativity of the American cultural reactionary.

I am Swedish and I always thought that that lyric actually didn't make any sense, and that was intentional.

So much many music lyrics is just a sequence of unrelated words strung together in a way that sounds good, and this sounded just like one more case of this.

That said, I never listen to lyrics in music, and at best I know the first line of the chorus even in songs I've listened to many times, so perhaps I'm wrong and there is a deeper meaning to hit songs.

Oh, and with regards to the Ace of Base song mentioned in another thread here, I always interpreted that sentence in the literal sense, that she wanted to become pregnant.

Finally, someone gets it.

Wow, you are overthinking it.

That was one of my first CDs and like most pop songs the lyrics were pretty meaningless and unanalyzed despite everyone being able to sing it.

The extent in which I heard anyone ever actually scrutinize the lyrics (until now) was when my friends and I thought it was hilarious to punch each other during the chorus.

Makes me cringe a bit to see someone try to expand it into some statement about American culture.

I once read an article mentioning it was okaying domestic violence. Seriously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin

> Martin is the songwriter with the third-most number-one singles on the chart, behind only Paul McCartney (32) and John Lennon (26). In addition, he has had the second most Hot 100 number-one singles as a producer (20), behind George Martin, who had achieved 23 by the time of his death.

Podcast where I heard about MM: http://www.switchedonpop.com/24-searching-for-max-martin/. If I remember correctly, they praise his lyrics as having a certain musicality to them, even if they're not always perfect English.

I was wondering why the article didn’t bring up the Britney Spears “hit me baby” thing.

Actually Max Martin is Swedish and he wrote tons and tons of the hits we hear today. Basically this dude and Lucazs Gottwald wrote the majority of ALL the hits from the last 10-20 years, which is why all pop sounds the same lol

I wonder what the actual percentage is. It’s pretty insane that two guys wrote a huge amount of the main pop songs you hear today.

They were close. "Hit me up" would be close enough to "call me" to work the way the way it was intended, but "hit me" definitely does not.

Never in my life had I heard of, or even imagined, people reading that song as literally, physically hitting. Signed / Swedish dude.

The song jacket just says "...baby one more time" (and that's the song's official name) because of the concern that it would be taken as a song about a guy beating his girlfriend and her asking for more abuse.

Like others here, I took it to mean "I need another hit of your addictive loving".

Neither had I. /English dude.

> make you wonder how many successful writers/producers of pop music come from Sweden.

A metric fuckton: https://tobyskinner.net/2017/06/11/the-great-swedish-pop-mac...

The book "The Song Machine" also talks about it.

Strange omissions in the history in the Toby Skinner article: Dr Alban and Leila K, whose international hits were also masterminded by Denniz PoP. But maybe they are mostly remembered by Swedes.

Perhaps from the phrase "hit me up"?

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hit%20me%20u...

Very similar example. Literal "hit" makes the song more interesting and mysterious. Is this s&m, abusive codependency... some other strange and curious but of culture?

One of Italo’s many charms is that you can often tell what the singer meant to say in English but the actual meaning is quite different or often just odd. Unlike the Swedish song writers mentioned here, I suspect many Italo artists knew only basic English, which they learned from song lyrics or movies or something.

This mimicry produced great songs—arguably much more disco disco than what came out of the states, sort of like why spaghetti westerns are the best westerns—and it also holds up a mirror to the original culture and material

I have never heard of italo before, but it appears to be a subgenre of disco.

Can you name a few "classic" hits one might know?

Yo listen up, here's the story About a little guy that lives in a blue world And all day and all night and everything he sees is just blue Like him, inside and outside Blue his house with a blue little window And a blue Corvette And everything is blue for him And himself and everybody around 'Cause he ain't got nobody to listen to

I'm blue da ba dee da ba dai?

I don’t have any particular recommendations, but if you want to explore, use the search term “Italo disco”, rather than “Italo”. YouTube can take you on a nice tour.

Lady of Ice by fancy is a good start

My Mine - Hypnotic Tengo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHvA0QFDoVY

There were two strands of italo disco: space one and the pop one, both can be quite fun

pop: Savage - Don't Cry Tonight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jfc-knHB41U (what computer is that?)

Silent Circle - Touch in the night https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAvd5x0KpU8

space: Charlie - Spacer Woman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eglu23iGsU0

Koto - Visitors https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4s3jJSjB1Y

Wikipedia has an ok starting list of artists: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Italo_disco_artists_... YouTube is the best for finding their work. Spotify mostly has remixes and compilations

For an example of the lyrics, check out “Hey Hey Guy” by the amazing Ken Laszlo: http://lyrics.wikia.com/wiki/Ken_Laszlo:Hey_Hey_Guy

> "Now I don’t know what they do to teach English to Swedish children, but whatever it is, anybody can see they do an excellent job."

Stop. Dubbing. Media.

I'm a big lover of cinema and every time I visit France, Germany or Spain they ruin classic movies by doing this shit. Just imagine the poor director who worked many hours to coach the actors to deliver a moving, terrific performance that hits just the right notes watch how people with a completely different culture and language botch it. Why do this? Everyone has an incentive to learn English if you stop with this, especially children.

Pretty much this. I believe that the main advantage smaller countries have (or maybe, had) in learning English is that the movies/games just weren't translated. If I wanted to watch Two Stupid Dogs or play Fallout, the only option was English.

These mistakes don’t just run from native language to foreign language. Any time you know more than one language you will end up screwing up the other in some way.

I am a native Norwegian speaker and it annoys me how many things we say in Norwegian adopted from english which makes no sense in Norwegian.

We translate the english: “let us go for it” to “la oss gå for det” but that literally means “let us walk for it”

I got bilingual kids and they screw up both languages. Norwegian grammar sneaks into english and english grammar and idioms sneak into their Norwegian. Neithet language is really spoken correctly

Same in German. A lot of people say "Das macht Sinn", which is a literal translation of "That makes sense." But "Sinn machen" is implausible in German because "machen" is more like "to manufacture".

I used to get worked up over it, but I talked to a linguist about it and he encouraged me to just let it go: That's just how languages develop.

You might be interested in this five-part series on this expression that meticoulsy lays out that (even though it might be an import from English) it fits perfectly well into how such expressions are constructed in German and it isn't really implausible (especially in the third post).

https://www.iaas.uni-bremen.de/sprachblog/2007/10/01/sinnesf...

I wonder if English and Norwegian is even easier to mess up between them, than say Swedish and English. I have often thought that English and Norwegian seem closer to each other than Swedish and English, even though Norwegian and Swedish also are very very similar.

I am thinking of things like "great" and "accurate" and a lot of other words which are basically the same in Norwegian and English.

There are a lot of cognates between English and Swedish too of course, but often you have traverse the language a bit farther to find the root, and often there are subtle differences in meaning.

Purblind being my current favorite - meaning completely blind in Swedish and the same in English - but only archaic language! In contemporary English it apparently means "partly blind".

Besided, I really wonder about your example. "Låt gå för det" is a totally Swedish expression, AFAIK it's not translated from English. To my ears, it's a bit archaic, which would rather suggest that this idiom has a common germanic parent for both English and Swedish.

Remember, English got a LOT of its shape from Old Norse. (From Norwegians and Danes.)

> We translate the english: “let us go for it” to “la oss gå for det” but that literally means “let us walk for it”

"la oss gå for det" seems like a direct translation but "vi går for den" seems more natural, don't you think? Like metaphorically marching towards some goal?

/Lived in Norway 15+ years, Norwegian wife and kids, English is not my native language

"låt gå för det" (Which is easily short for "låt [oss] gå för det") -->

I found a usage from 1912, before English was a great influence on Swedish:

https://litteraturbanken.se/forfattare/SoderbergH/titlar/Den...

Nice find!

But of course, no native speaker of English understood it that way. We all thought the song was taking this really surprising angle: “All that she wants is to get pregnant.

I know this is a little off-topic from the point of the article, but I think this is a very sophisticated take on the song! In my less sophisticated world, people in my community who got pregnant were never "gone tomorrow." There was no unexpected "goodbye." If the result was not marriage, there was always child support, interference with subsequent relationships, various threats of violence both ways, and/or a perpetual public argument about the sufficiency of the father's involvement. Based on what I saw around me, the "she's trying to get pregnant and then disappear" interpretation of the song just didn't make any sense, so I had a good immature teenage snicker over it but never doubted that "baby" meant "lover," never thought it was intended as a double-entendre, and never thought that the accidental double-entendre gave the song any extra depth. This is the first I've heard that people actually took it to be the intended meaning of the song! (Though with broader experience now I can see it's a viable interpretation.)

As a Swede I really enjoyed reading this. It's not easy to pay attention to the idioms of a foreign language, especially when they are sort of jumbled up in your mind with all the Swedish ones. But it's just to drive on.

> But it's just to drive on.

I'm American but I understood what you meant haha! Pop and rock lyrics are mostly not worthy of rational attention.

That's why these are my favorite lyrics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1qKv-kaYEk

Finnish Rock band Hurricanes and their "Get On"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGCviZAdxeY

it is not possible to assign a sensible meaning to the lyrics. This situation arose from the deficient knowledge of English by the singer, Remu Aaltonen. The words were supposed to be replaced later by proper English, and Remu’s words were only meant for a demo recording. However, the other members of the band, as well as the producer, thought that the delivery was strong, and decided to stick to those words, despite opposition from Remu Aaltonen. The unique words are part of the charm of the song.

Nit: Finnish rock band Hurriganes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurriganes

Finns often confuse c, g and q (none of which feature in native Finnish words) and the band name itself reflects that! (And while they probably didn't consider this back in the 1970s, it's also good SEO.)

TIL. I'm a Finn and slightly dyslectic. I didn't realize that the band name was misspelling until now.

"But it's just to drive on." = "Det är bara att köra på."

Was that intentional?

Yep

A couple of friends and I used to try to one-up each other in constructing asinine Swenglish idioms. I believe the ultimate winner was: "Who are you for one? I feel again you."

Haha that is brilliantly painful to read.

Evokes the Swedish band `Millencolin` which had a knack for consistently delivering great songs with simple lyrics. Were awesome live because everyone would sing along.

> Millencolin is a punk rock band that was formed in October 1992 by Nikola Šarčević, Mathias Färm, and Erik Ohlsson in Örebro, Sweden. In early 1993, drummer Fredrik Larzon joined the band. The name Millencolin is derived from the skateboard trick "melancholy".[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millencolin

I'm quite sure you can speak several languages on a native level, and you don't have to learn all of them when you're a kid.

My counterexample is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Conrad

BTW I don't consider myself a fluent English speaker (mostly because of my awful pronunciation), but all of the problems with ABBA songs specified in the article were clear to me. I was just never bothered by it, because songs by native English speakers have weird or even ungrammatical lyrics, too.

I wanted to mention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Nabokov (a Russian writer who became famous for his incredibly creative mastery of English), but Wikipedia says that he spoke English with his family as a child so maybe it can't be considered a foreign language for him.

Nabokov's mastery of English is incredibly impressive. It pays to read the annotated versions of his classics, because it's nearly impossible to catch all the allusions and word plays he employs.

I still wonder whether he could be caught out (as a non-native speaker) by something as simple as lullabies or so.

I moved to latin america at age 30 and started learning spanish. Now fluent several years later.

As a Swede I've definitely noticed a lot of these things in Swedish pop music. It's fun if a bit embarrassing.

What currently annoys me, though, is that there's this one mistake which always stands out when I hear it, but now I can't remember what it was. I thought it was in an ABBA song, but after going through their lyrics I can't spot it. It's an international hit by a Swedish band in any case. One in which a Swedish idiom is translated word by word and ends up meaning something entirely different.

Could it be "Take on me" with the Norwegian band "A-ha" from 1984?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djV11Xbc914

"Take on me" translated word for word will be "ta på meg" (Norwegian) or "ta på mig" (Swedish), meaning "touch me".

That wasn't the one I meant, but this one has also bugged me a lot!

If we're translating it word for word, they also say "Take me on" which makes sense in english, but not in Swedish.

EDIT: Maybe in Norwegian it does, at least they offer an explanation here https://genius.com/10492339

I've always felt that First Aid Kit, who have mastered American country-folk musical styling, lay it on a bit thicker than necessary with idioms. It's a bit like someone showing up to a cowboy bar wearing spurs.

"Now if there are any major ABBA psychopaths reading this, I know what you’re thinking [...]"

The choice of the word 'psychopath' is rather ironic given the context (whole article's narrative). The writer meant the word 'fan' or a synonym of that.

As a Swedish person, this was a delightful read. Even if I don't care much for the particular songs analyzed here. When I hear these types of slip-ups or mistakes from Swedish song-writers, I tend to either cringe a little (i.e. Jenny Wilson's "It's ok, come on, I won't do the things they learned me" from Let My Shoes Lead Me Forward), or find it to be delightfully naïve (i.e. "I called you, she answered Got strangled on the way" from The Concretes "New Friend"). Very much a question of personal preference, of course.

But I never really thought of the Ace of Base in the pregnancy context. Humbling for me for sure.

I’m not familiar with the song, but going by lyrics alone, “I won’t do the things they learned me” is accidentally spot-on for native speakers of some dialects of English where “learn” can also mean “teach”, e.g., “That’ll learn him to mess with me!” (= “That will teach him that he shouldn’t mess with me”). To native speakers in general, it comes off as adding a bit of old-fashioned/country flavour.

Thanks for pointing that out. As much as I pick up aspects of an English dialect here or there, I'm sure there are many more similar things I just don't know. If I heard a native speaker say the above, I would assume they were a bit uneducated, that it's a sociolect kind of thing.

The unintended mistakes in speaking/writing in another language is like a fingerprint of what country you originate from. I used to play a lot on old roleplaying servers and started noticing things that certain nationalities do with words. I'm from Sweden and could pick out germans pretty consistently.

Germany has a funny kids program that plays a sample in german and a foreign language while showing videoclips. You are supposed to guess what language it is. Pretty fun to get a feel for the sound-picture of a language :-)

It’s cool how you can pick up someone’s “accent” online in that way.

A spoken accent is often a dead giveaway if you have some idea of the phonology of their native language. The way a lot of people learn the sounds of a foreign language in the first place is by “transliterating” them to their native language—so they never quite pick up the foreign sounds exactly, just the nearest approximation from their native array of sounds.

But even if you can’t hear them, the mistakes and idiosyncrasies of their writing are going to be influenced by their native language as well, in fairly predictable ways.

Of course now that I’m trying to think of examples, I can’t recall any. :P

Incredibly true! There's a lot of shibboleths, odd turns of phrase, that come from people translating their thoughts literally into another language.

Japanese > English for example, you'll hear people say things like, "What are you doing from now?"

It's also very common to mix up articles, so I hear a lot of things being inflected very definitely, but they will use the indefinite article. Ex: "That band is great, but the singer is a problem." Grammatically correct, but a shade of meaning to the left of what they were trying to say.

Literally ten percent of American pop culture is one hundred percent Swedish. I married a Swede and it gave me an opportunity to see that there is an incredibly tight feedback loop between Sweden and the States, in some incredibly particular ways. Music is one of them. Edited to add that I typed this up wearing the hat I usually wear on another site, so I don't mean "literally" literally, but more like "seriously".

There is also this one, with lyrics that barely make any sense at all also by Max Martin I believe. https://www.laweekly.com/music/what-the-hell-is-backstreet-b...

Ostensible English speakers make similar mistakes when writing pop songs.

Consider Justin Timberlake in Rock Your Body. The chorus goes:

“Got time, but I don't mind

Just wanna rock you, girl

I'll have whatever you have

Come on let's give it a whirl”

But the issue is: got time but I don’t mind.

Well, why would you mind if you had the time? It should be “don’t have time but I don’t mind” or else “got time and I don’t mind”

Drives me nuts!

The beat is straight. Just dance.

I thought that was an interesting mistake to make since it really doesn't make a lot of sense. After looking around, it seems every website reports the lyric as "Got time" but according to JT, he actually says "Guy time".

https://twitter.com/THETNKIDS/status/978655880400068608

Anyway, that's not to say that native English speakers don't use gibberish or awkward phrases just to make a line sound nice, just that in this case it seems to be a lyric misunderstanding

You're barking up the wrong tree

Yeah and you're scratching for a bone

You triggered all of my words

Just to see all of your curves

Knock knockin up the prom queen

She had to shake it, won't die mean

Written by a native English speaker, but still as a native speaker myself I wouldn't swear I know exactly what that last line means.

Are you sure the author/producer of that song was a native english speaker?

> Today, Karl "Max" Martin [Sandberg] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin) is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Swedish producers. The likes of Klas Åhlund (Kylie Minogue, Robyn, Madonna), Shellback (Usher, One Direction, Taylor Swift, Icona Pop) and Martin Terefe (Westlife, James Blunt, KT Tunstall) have regularly produced international chart-topping hits in the last few years. Swedes have also recently conquered the world of J-pop and K-pop.

The Swedish Pop Machine is a very very real thing.

First Aid Kit is a Swedish band with some really great lyrics. One song that's intrigued me with it's ambiguity is Emmylou, which contains the line:

Stockholm's cold but I've been told

I was born to endure this kind of weather

Is she predisposed to be okay with cold climates, or was she born so that her parents could handle the cold?

I'll be your Emmylou and I'll be your June

If you'll be my Gram and my Johnny too

No, I'm not asking much of you

Just sing little darling, sing with me

Romantic love or parental love? Is she saying the last line, or is it her parents talking to her? Wonderful stuff.

> Is she predisposed to be okay with cold climates, or was she born so that her parents could handle the cold?

The second meaning doesn't make any sense, you could say "I was born to fulfil this destiny" for instance, because there's only one subject in the sentence, the singer.

> Romantic love or parental love?

"I'll be your X" is a clear indication of romantic love...

> Is she saying the last line, or is it her parents talking to her?

Where do her parents come into this? There's no ambiguity at all here: the singer isn't asking much of the person they're singing about, only that they sing along with them.

Given that the song is about famous country and western stars, two of which were married while the other two almost became a couple but one died before it might have happened, it seems like you've read ambiguity into it where there isn't any, and used it to fill in your own interpretation. Which I'm sure we all do at times.

What's amazing about Abba is not only are the tunes instantly memorable ... so are the lyrics. I don't remember the lyrics to anything and yet those pop right out at us.

Maybe even more-so than the Beatles.

And if I meet you, what if I eat you? I am the tiger!

Hey, you're right.

> “Waterloo! / I couldn’t escape if I wanted to.” You wouldn’t think foreigners would be able to come up with that.

Wow, condescending much?

To me it felt like genuine appreciation. I can fake it for a bit in several languages but writing pop songs in them would feel like a massive achievement.

It's a backhanded compliment. I agree that the author thinks he showing appreciation but that is insulting. It's the same inherent condescension that I've seen a lot of Americans show towards foreigners.

The author greatly underestimates the native speakers potential for screwing up song lyrics, but other than that, these are fun examples.

Looking at Scandinavian songs that didn't become international hits, we have a lot more, much worse examples :)

Lil Yachty is an American rapper, who poetically sang "She blow that dick like a cello"

> The author greatly underestimates the native speakers potential for screwing up song lyrics

I think what's interesting is how it's often possible to trace a mistake back to a word or idiom in the speaker's native language. For example, a poster elsewhere in the thread pointed out how ABBA confuses 'fun' and 'funny', which can be explained by there existing words in Swedish that mean both things.

Native Swedish speaker here. I've always interpreted it to be about actual babies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com