Swedish words ending in -itet

Okay. So, now we need to think back. Do you remember the word for "to want"? To want, how would you say that?

Att vilja.

How did you say "I want", and it's irregular?

Jag vill. Very good. So, how would you say, "I want to have"? And "to have" is att ha. Att ha.

Jag vill ha. Good. So here you're thinking, "Wait, you said att ha". And that would be correct. In Swedish you can actually, in many cases, you can omit it. You can remove it.

"Jag vill att ha", that would be incorrect actually. What you would say instead is "jag vill ha", "I want have". "Do you want to have a banana?" So, you need to think about this sentence. And to say "banana": banan, en banan.

Okay, so you need to break it up. First you want to say "you want", that's du vill.

"To have" is ha. So, du vill ha. And then of course, en banan. Du vill ha en banan. You want to have a banana. And to make it into a question, you change the order.

So you get: vill du ha en banan?

"Are you a professor? Yes, I'm a professor." To say "yes" you would say: ja, ja.

To say that, you would say: Är du en professor? Or är du professor? And of course, to say the remaining part is "Ja." Yes. "I'm a professor." Jag är professor.

Or jag är en professor. Okay, now let's say, "we want to inspire".

And of course, we've had the word inspire before, right? Similar to preparation, presentation, inspiration.

So how would you say, "we want to inspire"?

Vi vill inspirera.

Vi vill inspirera. And you don't need the "to", so you don't need to say "att inspirera", you can say "vi vill inspirera", we want inspire. We want inspire.

Okay, so how did you say "to be able to"? In Swedish this would be "to can", to can.

Att kunna, to be able to.

How do you say "we can"?

Vi kan.

"Can you speak Swedish?" How would you say that?

Kan du tala svenska?

"Do you want to have a train?" Vill du ha ett tåg? And of course we remember since the previous exercise that train is "ett tåg", it's not "en tåg". is one of those words that begin with ett if you want to talk about a thing, like ett tåg, a train.

Okay. At this point, we need to learn how to say "now", as in, "I want something done now". To say "now" in Swedish, you would say nu, nu.

Given that knowledge, how would you say, "Can we eat now?" Kan vi äta nu?

So, you put the "now" in the exact same place as you would in English. Nu is "now". "Can we eat now?" Kan vi äta nu?

So, how would you say like, "Can you eat now?" That would, of course, be: Kan du äta nu?

So you may remember from the beginning of this course that we, we sort of looked at words that exist in both English and Swedish. Because if you can take words, if you can borrow words that you know from one language into another, well, then that makes the job a lot easier, doesn't it? So, the type of words we talked about earlier had to do with words that ended with -ation, like information, preparation, presentation.

But there are other types of words that exist in Swedish, as well. So for instance, the words that end with -ity, such as university, identity, flexibility, formality, integrity. These types of words that end with -ity, in many situations, they also exist in Swedish. However, you have to change them up a little bit before they become Swedish words.

So, for example, instead of saying university, you remove the Y, and you add on e t, e t. So what you get is universitet. And sometimes you can see that the R and the S are pronounced like a sh sound, like you're shushing someone.

So you may hear it as universitet, universitet. But if you said universitet, that would be perfectly understandable.

So how would you say identity, if you use the same formula?

Identitet. And notice that the stress is in the beginning. You say identitet, identitet.

So what about flexibility?

Flexibilitet.

Formality? How would you say formality?

Formalitet.

And then finally, integrity?

Integritet. And of course, there are other words that also end with -ity, such as ethnicity, quality, electricity, and you have to sometimes change them up a little bit. So, for instance, ethnicity: you don't have the th in Swedish, you don't usually find that in Swedish, instead you find just the t, so you would say etnicitet.

And quality: well, the q is not used in Swedish in the same way it's used in English, even though it's part of the Swedish alphabet, you don't use it that much, instead you would use k, so you would say kvalitet, quality, kvalitet. And then electricity, the c will become a k, so you get elektricitet. But they all end with -et.