From Germany, hm, then I guess it came the same way to Sweden, as you say. You know so much!

Ian Rankin is a good detective story writer and he can paint a gritty, very realistic picture of Scotland, but – it is always a picture. Scotland has a population roughly the same size as Denmark in a land area roughly twice as large, but I guess there are plenty of people in Britain and the US who think they know it just from having seen The Killing or Borgen.

Hehe! Many old languages have run together to form the ones we use today. The roots of English lie in the Anglo-Saxon dialect of German from 1500 years ago, but there is a huge number of French origin words (around 35% of the 20,000 most commonly used English words is the usual figure). Depending how you count, between 5% and 7% of modern English comes to us from the Vikings. By contrast all the modern Scandinavian languages have their roots in Old Norse, but Swedish has a massive vocabulary (c.40%) borrowed from Low German – it’s just the loans were made so long ago that you don’t notice them because they have become “naturalised”. Of course, both Swedish and English have borrowed from Latin and Greek too, but not nearly to the same degree.