It’s linguistic deja vu all over again: After embarrassing episodes with mores and awry it now turns out I’ve been making arguments in Swedish all over the place using the Swedish term “in fatta” whenever I want to say “in fact”. But in fact it turns out “in fatta” is pure fiction on my part. I must have used it once, nobody complained, and it soon became a standard argumentative technique.
Which, again, leads to the question, what were people thinking I was saying? Problem is, there does not seem to be a exact conceptual translation into Swedish for this rethorical shortcut. OK, nu vet jag äntligen att “in fatta” inte betyder “in fact”. In fatta, det betyder ingenting på svenska, även om jag använde det varje dag tills Fredagskväll, då en vän frågade vad egentligen jag betydde.
Men jag tycker om att använda “in fact” på engelska, därför att jag vanligen argumenterar med en struktur som behöver ge specifika exemplar av en motsats. Nu har jag ingen översättning av detta mentala begrepp på svenska. “Faktum är?” “Egentligen?” Det verkar inte vara samma sak. Kan ni inte börja använda “in fatta”, för min skull?
Perhaps I haven’t grasped the full understanding of “in fact”, but I use “Faktum är” in the same way I think you want to use “in fatta”.
If you really want your new word to be a part of swedish dictionaries you should distribute “in fatta” to Latin Kings. Then it’ll soon show up in the faktarutor for articles on understanding-the-youth with headlines like: “Nysvenska – ‘hajja tugget, len'”.
But everything has to start somewhere so tomorrow I vow to use “in fatta” in some kind of natural context.
“vad egentligen jag betydde.”
should be “vad jag egentligen menade.”
I själva verket, faktiskt, faktum är, depending on context.
Jag körde “in fatta” på Altavistas translatefunktion. Italienska-Engelska:
In fatta=In Made (vad nu det betyder).
In fatta has an Arabic ring. Perhaps the In’fatta is your personal rebellion against Swedish.
I also said awree (emphasis on first syllable) for awry for years, though I was lucky enough to be tipped off on the actual pronunciation as a teenager. Only when I reached college, though, did I realize that “misled” is not one of those words (like “tomte”) that has two pronunciations.
Misled is in fatta always the past tense of mislead, and is pronounced Miss Led. It is never the past tense of misle (to pull the wool over [someone’s eyes]), and hence is never pronounced my-zl.
Oops. Sorry, Swedes, that’s “tomten”.
The past tense of misle? Is there a present tense of misle? I misle my sweater?
The OED gives the standard spelling as “mizzle” and the last citation for that is 1876. Hands up who thinks Opie’s origins are rural? 🙂
You could squeeze the two words together and attempt a sneaky past tense use of “in fatta”, ie. infattat – a close cousin to uppfattat with a smidge of underförstått thrown in. It could mean ‘to accept and agree upon a concept before consciously understood’.
Blows it’s use as ‘in fact’ though.
Ha! Just checked Norstedts and infatta is a verb meaning to border or edge, frame or in relation to jewelry to mount.
I sank my own battleship.
Thought it sounded familiar.
People may have had images of arguments and opinions being framed?
Stefan!
“Faktum är att…” är nog den bästa översättningen på svenska. Det går utmärkt att använda. En annan variant är: “I själva verket..”
Jag uppmuntrar till användning av sådana uttryck. Det kommer att ge dig en helt annan auktoritet när du talar svenska.
infitada?
Som tvåspråkig och översättare anser jag att “faktum är” är en alldeles fullgod översättning av “in fact”. Det är knappt den minsta nyansskillnad dem emellan.