{"id":14541,"date":"2017-09-21T22:53:00","date_gmt":"2017-09-21T21:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=14541"},"modified":"2017-09-21T22:53:00","modified_gmt":"2017-09-21T21:53:00","slug":"orkar-du","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=14541","title":{"rendered":"Orkar du?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A useful Swedish expression I learnt recently is Orkar du?<\/strong>, which can mean “Do you have the energy?”, “Can you be bothered?” or similar.<\/p>\n

It doesn’t mean “Are you a killer whale (orca)?”, as I thought it did when I first heard it.<\/p>\n

Orkar<\/strong> is the present tense of orka<\/strong> [\u02c8\u0254r\u02ccka], which means to manage, to be able to, to cope with, or can. It is used in Icelandic and Faroese as well. It comes from the Old Norse orka<\/em>, from Proto-Germanic *wurkijan\u0105<\/em> (to work, to make), from Proto-Indo-European *w\u1e5b\u01f5-<\/em> (to make), which is also the root of the English word work.<\/p>\n

Here are a few examples of how it’s used:<\/p>\n

– s\u00e5 mycket de orkar b\u00e4ra = as much as they can bear
\n– \u00e4t-s\u00e5-mycket-du-orkar = all-you-can-eat
\n– Jag orkar inte = I can’t be bothered
\n– Jag orkar inte med tanken p\u00e5 att f\u00f6rlora de sm\u00e5 skatterna = I can’t stand the thought of losing my little treasures.
\n– Hur ofta h\u00f6r vi inte att m\u00e4nniskor inte orkar bry sig? = How often do we hear that people just don’t care?
\n– Jag orkar inte med detta l\u00e4ngre. = I can’t take this anymore<\/p>\n

A related word is ork<\/strong>, which means energy.<\/p>\n

Sources: Linguee<\/a>, bab.la<\/a> and Wiktionary<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A useful Swedish expression I learnt recently is Orkar du?, which can mean “Do you have the energy?”, “Can you be bothered?” or similar. It doesn’t mean “Are you a killer whale (orca)?”, as I thought it did when I first heard it. Orkar is the present tense of orka [\u02c8\u0254r\u02ccka], which means to manage, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,107,124,10,36,45,67,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-etymology","category-icelandic","category-language","category-old-norse","category-proto-indo-european","category-swedish","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14541\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}