Grammar Moses: Tusen tack for reading my travelogue

If you're like me, you're probably a lover of language in general - not just English.

I can remember spending hours with phrase books before embarking on trips to France, Italy, Germany, Chile, Argentina and elsewhere.

I've never been comfortable pantomiming my way through a country, especially when I'm not familiar with its customs. That's a good way to get a black eye.

I don't want to come off as an ugly American, demanding that what I have at home be given to me when I'm visiting another country - Burger Kings notwithstanding.

But I've come to realize in recent years that at least in places across Europe and South America where tourists are most likely to be, people tend to speak English beautifully.

And that's why I didn't bother looking at any phrase books before visiting Scandinavia.

I just returned from two weeks in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and two plane stops in Iceland. I had one conversation during that time that was a challenge, and that's because the person was old enough to have missed the ritual of learning English along with the mother tongue.

The taxi driver who took us to the airport in Bergen, Norway, apologized for what he called his passing knowledge of English. Yet we gabbed with him for 30 minutes straight. He was from Iran, where he learned Persian, although Turkish was the language his family spoke. He spoke very good English, with only minor syntactic quirks. He also spoke some German and a couple of other languages. But not Norwegian. "It's too difficult," he said. Besides, everyone speaks English in Norway, he said.

Every time I encounter this kind of rampant multilingualism, I'm reminded of how easy Americans have it and how we could all stand to be more open to other languages.

Tak!

One phrase you should always have at the ready when you travel, especially if you'll be trying food you've never had before, is "Where is the bathroom?"

The other, of course, is "Thanks."

I learned German in high school. "Tag!" in German is a greeting, short for "Guten Tag" or "Good day." It's pronounced "tock" as in tick tock.

In Icelandic, "takk" means "Thanks." Again, it's pronounced "tock."

In Danish, it's spelled "tak."

In Norwegian, it's "takk."

And in Swedish, it's "tack."

What's fun about Nordic languages is how easy it is to translate them to English. "Tusen tack" means "a thousand thanks."

It's my experience that when you say "tack" in Sweden, the person you're addressing feels he or she has done something extraordinary for you. Among those extraordinary things would be giving me a plate of something other than herring.

Whether tak, takk or tack, they're all pronounced "tock."

But when you spell them out, make sure if you're visiting Stockholm that you include the "C." Otherwise, people will wonder why you're talking about a roof.

Frokost

From high school German class, I know that "Fruhstuck" means "breakfast." (Pardon my lack of umlauts; my keyboard doesn't have them.)

So I was surprised that in Denmark, a "frokost" menu was for lunch, rather than breakfast.

I learned this the day before we were heading to Sweden via a 6:25 a.m., six-hour train trip during which we would be served "frukost."

We asked our Danish hotel clerk whether frukost and frokost were the same thing, and after she Googled it we learned in Sweden it's lunch. But we didn't know in which language our train tickets were printed, even though we bought them in Denmark.

We got to the train station early to buy some sandwiches for the trip, guessing we might be served breakfast once we boarded. And wouldn't you know it - a Danish breakfast is what we got as we were crossing the border into Sweden.

Write carefully, and tack for reading!

• Jim Baumann is vice president/managing editor of the Daily Herald. Write him at jbaumann@dailyherald.com. Put Grammar Moses in the subject line. You also can friend or follow Jim at facebook.com/baumannjim.