34 Åke Viberg
Norwegian Hans kone visste jo at de skulle kjøre med ham.
Danish Hans kone vidste jo, at de skulle køre med ham.
Icelandic Konan hans vissi þó að þær áttu að aka með honum.
Dutch Zijn vrouw wist immers dat ze met hem mee zouden rijden.
German Seine Frau wußte ja, daß sie mit ihm fuhren.
French --- (no translation)
Finnish Tiesihän hänen vaimonsa, että he lähtisivät hänen autossaan.
English, which does not have any well-developed correspondent to åka, uses
a restructured sentence as a translation where the Passenger is realized as an
object instead of as a subject (see Transportation, Section 7.2). Among the
Scandinavian languages, only Icelandic uses a cognate aka, whereas a cognate
of Swedish köra, which can only be used in Swedish when the subject is Driver,
is used in Norwegian (kjøre) and Danish (køre). As will be shown in Section 7,
the cognates of Swedish köra in Danish and Norwegian cover both the meaning
of åka (‘travel as a passenger’) and köra (‘operate a vehicle, travel as a driver’).
Dutch uses rijden, which is a cognate of English ride (Swedish rida) and has
cognates in all the Germanic languages with a form that is still transparent, but
only the meaning ‘ride on horseback’ is shared by all the Germanic languages.
German uses fahren, which is a vehicle verb in German and does not have the
same general meaning as Icelandic fara. (Swedish fara is also a vehicle verb, see
Section 6.) The literal translation of the Finnish translation he lähtisivät hänen
autossaan is rather ‘they should leave/go in his car’. The verb lähteä used in this
example is a frequent translation of åka. There is, however, a Finnish vehicle verb
ajaa that semantically closely resembles German fahren and covers both åka and
köra (see Section 7.3).
Even if corpus data are presented in (5), the description given above is ideal-
ized in the sense that examples have been selected in such a way that they show
the closest semantic correspondents of the Swedish verb as far as possible. In the
following, usage patterns will be studied as they are reflected in the complete set
of translations. It turns out that even when there is a corresponding vehicle verb,
some other type of motion verb is often used as a translation in some languages.
In some cases, in particular when directional verbs are used in French, this can
be regarded as a consequence of the need to express some other meaning that is
profiled (e.g. direction), but, as we shall see, there are also cases where a language
simply seems to favour another way of perspectivizing a situation than Swedish.
The way åka is translated in the MPC languages when used as a vehicle verb is
shown in Table 2. The translations have been divided into four semantic subfields
of motion verbs. The first comprises the nuclear verbs ‘go’ and ‘come’ which are
the two most frequent motion verbs in all the languages included in the table.