The lexical profile of Swedish 49
(Söderwall 1884–1918). According to Buck (1949), Swedish åka is a late reflex of
an Indo-European root *aĝ- with the primary meaning ‘drive’, which is reflected
in Greek αγω ‘lead’ and Latin agere ‘drive, carry on, act, do’ (cf. Mod. Eng. act).
Thus the active meaning is the oldest.
The Swedish verb fara has a transparent cognate in all the Germanic lan-
guages, but the extension of the verb varies dramatically between the present-
day Germanic languages. It is found in the form faran as early as Gothic with
a general motion verb meaning. In the Germanic standard languages treated in
this paper (except Icelandic), fara has in varying degree developed more special-
ized meanings. As we have seen, German fahren covers both the operation of a
vehicle and the passive sense of being transported in a vehicle, whereas Swedish
fara is primarily used with the latter sense (contrasting with köra ‘drive’) as an
alternative to åka, which today is the more frequent alternative. (In some dialects
and regional varieties of Swedish, fara still has a more extended use.) In English,
fare is used with low frequency, primarily together with well/badly in the sense
‘to experience god or bad treatment (or success or failure)’ and in the set phrase
farewell. In Dutch, the meaning is restricted to motion on water with a vessel:
varen ‘go by boat, sail’. The use of fara in present-day Swedish clearly represents a
narrowing-down of the original very general meaning. One reflection of this is the
great number of extended meanings which form a rather loose network as briefly
discussed in Section 6.
The verb köra has cognates only in the other Scandinavian languages. In Old
Norse keyra had meanings such as ‘drive forward (esp. horse), set in motion,
ride, thrust’ (Bjorvand & Lindeman 2000, kjøre). Obviously, the use of k(j)øre
in Norwegian and Danish to refer to being transported is an extension from the
active meaning which is more original. Drive is a common Germanic verb not
found outside Germanic. According to the OED, the oldest attested meaning in
English (from 1000) is ‘To force (people or animals) to move on before one, or
flee away from one’ and, according to Buck (1949, 10.65 DRIVE), this meaning is
a common source for many verbs referring to the operation of a vehicle.
In addition to åka and fara, there is another verb in Swedish that refers to
travelling as a passenger, namely resa. But this verb is not used with the same fre-
quency as åka and usually refers to a longer journey that requires preparation. It
has rather close equivalents in all the languages treated above, as can be observed
in the rightmost column in Table 7. The reason it is treated rather briefly is that the
number of examples is rather restricted in the MPC corpus. As could be observed
in Table 2, these verbs can serve as translations of åka to some extent, but this type
of verb is not the major translation of åka or fara in any of the MPC languages.
In addition to voyager ‘make a journey’, French primarily has one vehicle verb
(conduire), which is used in examples where the operation of a vehicle is profiled.