Imagine spotting a mysterious object in the water:
| The message in a bottle bobbed on the wave. | Flaskposten guppade på vågen. |
If you find a message in a bottle (en flaskpost), you will naturally want to know its origin. To talk about where something started its journey, Swedish uses the relative adverb varifrån (literally "where from").
While English often splits this concept up (putting "where" at the start of a clause and "from" at the end), Swedish keeps varifrån together as a single word. It is frequently used to introduce indirect questions.
| I wonder where it comes from. | Jag undrar varifrån den kommer. |
| We do not know where it started to float from. | Vi vet inte varifrån den började flyta. |
You will often pair varifrån with verbs of motion to trace the path of an object, such as the deponent verb färdas (to travel).
| We have to find out where it has traveled from. | Vi måste ta reda på varifrån den har färdats. |
Once you know where it came from, the next step is reading the message inside. The verb tyda means to decipher or interpret.
| I tried to decipher the text in the message in a bottle. | Jag försökte tyda texten i flaskposten. |
| Can you decipher if it came from our continent? | Kan du tyda om den kom från vår kontinent? |
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