u/ImpasseduPelican

Eh, it was called after the Swedish tribe’s own name for themselves, Finland just also borrowed the same name as its word for Swedes.

Hugely influenced, as I understand. Not a linguist myself but hang out with a lot of linguists; one specific thing I’ve seen attributed to Germanic  influence is the complex and crowded vowel system, compared with the much simpler vowel systems in core Romance languages.

Swedish crisps are great, no disagreement there, but other countries also have great ranges with very different kinds of flavours. In France you can get crisps based on a dozen different kinds of cheese. In the states I had jalapeño crisps that really tasted of fresh roasted jalapeños. In South-East Asia you can get all sorts of different seafood and vegetable dish flavours. And just on texture, if you like a good sturdy potato crunch, the best I’ve ever had were Spanish, second best were British, Sweden probably joint third with the US.

It really feels like people in this thread are comparing the full depth of the Swedish selection with just the tip of the iceberg of what other countries have to offer.

And specifically, in the UK the only two cormorant species are Great Cormorant and European Shag, so colloquially they’re just known as cormorant and shag here. (And indeed these are the species the names originally were for, before getting generalised globally as modern ornithology developed.)

Norwegian dialects vary hugely on this — there are some dialects that only use the mitt barn order, others that only use barnet mitt, and others that use both forms depending on context and style.

A lot more old-fashioned practical clothing in my experience, though, compared with modern technical clothing in several neighbouring countries (both Germany and Slovenia).

Parmo’s the only  name up in NE England where it’s also pretty popular.  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PIItRDeHKng

Eh, British pubs are just popular all over, and Churchill is held up as an icon. Sweden has plenty of similar pubs (including a Churchill Arms) despite a very different WWII history (as Norwegians sometimes remind us quite pointedly).

Not sure about the bird, but just fyi it’s “Lower Austria” in English — nether was historically a normal synonym for lower but today it’s only used in a few set phrases, mainly euphemisms.

She’s not lost, just waiting for her quarter-pounder melt with fries

För mig var det von Triers Antichrist som var den äkta wtf.

Isn’t the ‘bittern’ a juv night heron, if you mean the one at foreground top left? Or is there an actual bittern somewhere that I’m missing?

Beror helt på vad som du tycker är “wow”, men om du vill ha något lite seriöst rekommenderar jag Melancholia, 2011, Lars von Trier. Tungt men spektakulärt. Föreslår att du inte läser för mycket om handlingen på förhand.

> Your time is never more valuable than other people times.

That’s the whole point, though. I’m not saying “I want to jump the queue and get ahead of everyone else”, I’m saying “I want everyone to be doing a zipper merge because it saves time all around”. Which is also presumably the reason Trafikverket’s guidelines quoted in several other comments also recommend it.

To be clear, I’m not saying I think Sweden is particularly bad — I’ve driven in some places where people were better at zipper merges than I see here around Stockholm, but also in many places with much worse driving altogether. What I’m arguing is just that zipper merges are more efficient than the “single queue” approach, and we should be co-operating to make them happen (again, as Trafikverket also tells us to), not insisting on enforcing the queue.

you cannot simply expect others to let your merge

In fact, as another commenter pointed out upthread, you can expect exactly that according to the traffic regulations (trafikförordningen, 3 kap. 44 §):

Om två körfält löper samman till ett skall förarna under ömsesidigt hänsynstagande anpassa sig till de nya förhållandena.

Man kör alltså fram till där filerna går ihop och turas om, enligt blixtlåsprincipen. Enligt 3 kap. 43 § ska dessutom förare i det andra körfältet anpassa farten så att det blir lätt att komma in.

Only if the people in the ”queue” don’t let them in smoothly. A proper zipper merge is absolutely smooth and better for traffic than a double-length single lane tailback.

America varies a lot, I lived in cities where people jaywalked nearly as freely as Brits+Irish, but visited other places that were almost as strict as Germany.

Yeah, both Hershey’s and dried parmesan evoke sick when you’re not accustomed to them. I got used to Hershey’s after living in the states a few years but now that I’m back in Europe and rarely have it it smells awful again…

I don’t exactly disagree, but think the legal/visa side is a much bigger consideration than direct racism. On face-to-face racism Sweden is far from perfect, but it’s not at the level of being a serious life obstacle (at least in highly-educated careers; not sure about other industries). On immigration law we’re now one of the tightest in Europe, and no prospect of getting much better any time soon. Visa/residence issues are going to be a much, much bigger headache in any middle-class immigrant’s life here than in-person racism.

As an academic in a related field, this is excellent advice.

I think you’re seriously overgeneralising from your own experience. I work in academia here and I’ve seen one department where PhD admissions were like you describe, but at my own and most others I know, almost all PhD students are “unknowns” to us until they apply. I’m sure it varies a lot between fields and places, but that’s what I’ve seen (over several different fields and universities, all within STEM).

That said, it’s totally true that PhD places are very competitive. Research funding (at least in the fields I know) is much tighter than it was even a few years ago, so OP will have to build up a pretty strong application to have a chance.

Could it also be Common Gallinule, or do you see something that rules that out? (The two are very similar, and were lumped as a single species until 2011; now the species are split, with the Eurasian races under Common Moorhen, which had always been the English common name for the species in Europe, and the American races under Common Gallinule, the North American common name.)

Imagine an American saying “look, everyone understands that you can’t just take a month off work” to argue that parental leave is an unreasonable expectation. One of the great things in Sweden is that we prioritise parental time seriously, and have a system set up so that you really *can* take half a year off work, and we find it shocking that many other places make much less allowance for it.

At the other end of life, a lot of other countries prioritise caring for elderly/ill relatives more than many people do here. Do you really think it’s only “Stone Age villagers” who expect spending a month or more with family around a serious illness and maybe death should be a big priority, in the same way that most Swedes agree parental leave is one?

Try Danish, there it’s nine-and-half-fives.

Word-for-word surely it’s not so much “for me like cats” so much as “to-me please cats”? A lot of other languages use similar structure, like Italian “mi piacciono i gatti”, “me please the cats”.

I like the Russian phrasing for *have* as well: “At you is cat? No, at me is not of cat.” (“Do you have a cat? No, I don’t have a cat.”)