Livre d'Or

The other is morphological, it's a distinct form of the verb, with its own past tense and everything.

This is baffling (and consequently I love it); living languages are of course in a constant state of flux. Whilst some factors become simplified, the complexity is made up in new developments. But I'd always thought that something like a morphological passive (there's a different word that you can also use to describe this but I can't remember it - non-periphrastic or something) would be something that "dropped off". Now I need to look over my Old Germanic course notes to scour this out, because it's simply lovely.

Wikipedia tells me that the indefinite neuter article is ett: the corresponding word in Dutch is het. This is all completely logical, I know it having as I do something of a fetish (!) for Germanic languages, but it still makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Compared to Swedish, Dutch adjectives sound relatively simple (and here I was thinking that my language acquistion was an impressive feat!): predicative adjectives aren't inflected and appear as in the dictionary (het boek is rood, the book is red); attributive adjectives are inflected (there's only one inflection, -e) unless the noun is singular, neuter and indeterminate. So het rode boek, the red book, but een rood boek, a red book. Dutch spelling rules (which are a great deal more sensible than English spelling) account for the rood/rode change.

Otherwise attributive adjs. always decline: de mooie, grote bibliotheek, the beautiful, big library.

One quirk that may or may not match up in Swedish (it doesn't in German but German is a special child) is that the difference in gender (we also have simply "common" and "neuter", although I like to try and learn whether a common noun is masculine or feminine, because I like that) only shows in the singular. All plurals are de.

I will stop now because I have other stuff to do, otherwise I would happily sit here yacking. I hope you carry on enjoying Swedish as much as you seem to do now, and as you improve then I'd be interested in picking your brains about how the verbs work (in a not always obvious way) - my thesis is about verbs in English, Dutch and Tagalog, and whilst I could be said to have a bias for Indo-European languages, when the Germanics are just as scrummy as they are, the criticism just washes off me.

Oh ps: as for German, I'm inclined to think that the retention of the case system to such an extent is maybe the most significant reason why this language stands out on its own. It's nearest neighbour on the Continent (I don't know much about Pennsylvania Dutch et al) other than Plattedeutsch is certainly Dutch (and even that situation isn't as clear cut as an LJ-comment would like), and yet you find a flexibility in Dutch word order that doesn't happen in German (I'm thinking about PPs coming after a clause-final verb). Then again there's the wiggle room given by the cases in German, so it's all good.