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Comment by asabla | Hacker News Reader

It could also be that ice cream is very close to glass in Swedish. Matter in fact ice cream in Swedish is actually spelled the same as glass.

So depending on how well you pronounced it, you may just have said: I can eat ice cream, it doesn't hurt

edit: added a missing word

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For those wondering, single consonant means slow vowel, double consonant means fast vowel, just like “floss”. So:

glass (swe) -> gláss (ice cream)

glas (swe) -> glaas (glass)

To make it even easier these two words also have different A-sounds, the first quick one has the one in english “tan”, the second has the one in “car”.

Plot twist, in Hiberno English that A-sound is the same in both words :)

Ice cream in French is also "glace" which is of course spelled differently but sounds pretty much the same as glass.

Swedish has a long history of importing words from French (as do many other European languages for obvious historical reasons), so I’m quite sure this is indeed the origin of the word.

What usually happened though was that after importing the word, it (sometimes) got a new spelling more compatible with Swedish phonetics. Other examples of this include Swedish “trottoar” (fr: “trottoir”)

I guess it's obvious in retrospect but I didn't realize that the Romanian trotuar is also an obvious French import.

A lot of Swedish words that end in -oar (like “reservoar”, “memoar” etc) are all french import originally ending in -oir, so if you start digging into words ending with -uar in Romanian you’ll probably find more :-)

Or even not depending - if something similar happened in English I'd just 'autocorrect' on my hearing to assume they were saying the saner thing or that contextually made most sense, even if they'd pronounced the other perfectly.

I sort of wonder if this was a very elaborate joke.

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