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I was going to say "also, isn't the Swedish word for 'quick' snabb?" But then Wiktionary told me that there is, in fact, also a word kvick with a similar meaning.

Extra bonus: it turns out that quick/kvick is cognate with Italian/Spanish/Portuguese vivo 'alive' (which makes the older sense in "the quick and the dead" make more sense, too!).



In addition to "the quick and the dead", it also appears in the idiom "(cut) to the quick", meaning to cut someone deeply - usually emotionally.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cut_to_the_quick https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/to_the_quick

Take it back further, and it's cognate with bíos in ancient Greek, whence the prefix bio-.


In Croatian "Quicksilver" is called "Živa", which also means "alive".


same in Polish ("żywe srebro"). eg. http://www.filmweb.pl/film/%C5%BBywe+srebro-1986-9031


There is "kvick", sure. But "kalkul" certainly isn't a word. The closest match would be "kalkyl". So the language seems to be named by messing up the spelling of two words, which I guess isn't impossible but still somewhat ... weird.


kvikkalkul sounds Norwegian rather than Swedish. It'd mean "fast calculation", more or less.

There's also Plankalkül by Zuse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl




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