Breakdown of Barnet älskar sin rosa sockervadd.
barnet
the child
älska
to love
sin
his/her/its/their own (en-word)
rosa
pink
sockervadden
the cotton candy
Questions & Answers about Barnet älskar sin rosa sockervadd.
Why doesn't the adjective rosa have a special ending here?
The word rosa (pink) is an indeclinable adjective. This means it never changes its ending, no matter if the noun is an en-word, an ett-word, singular, or plural. It is always just rosa.
Why do we use sin here instead of dess (its)?
When a third-person subject (like "he", "she", "it", or "they") owns the object in the sentence, Swedish uses the reflexive possessive sin (or sitt / sina) to mean "their own" or "its own". If the sentence used dess, it would mean the child loves some other child's or animal's cotton candy.
Since barnet (the child) is an ett-word, shouldn't it be sitt instead of sin?
Possessive words like sin always agree with the gender and number of the thing being owned, not the owner. Even though the owner is barnet (an ett-word), the object being owned is sockervadd, which is an en-word. Therefore, we use sin.
How does the compound word sockervadd work?
It is made by combining socker (sugar) and vadd (wadding or cotton wool). Just like all compound words in Swedish, the grammatical gender is decided by the final word in the compound. Since it is en vadd, the whole treat is an en-word.
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