Look, if you add æ and ø you also have to add å, otherwise Danes will be confused.
does ø have a name? just o with a line or what
Yes, it’s called ø.
Us nords have nine vowel letters:
- a e i
- o u y
- æ ø å
and they all are just themselves for a name. Like e isn’t “c with a line” any more than q is “o with a leg”.
They’re also all monophthongs, which is hard to communicate to anglophones who pronounce their vowel letters overwhelmingly as diphthongs. E.g. anglos probably read the vowel letters as
- ey i ay
- åo ju way
- ??? ??? ???
There’s an æøå song which might help.
W just kinda standing here awkwardly
also now that i’m a few seconds into the song, that is a great song
i also finally know how to pronounce the name of my favorite shoes correctly. which is either going to relieve or infuriate my danish friend. they refuse to tell me.
W is a double-v for us, so our alphabet goes uvw (u ve dobbel-ve), rather than uwv (ju dabbel-ju vi).
Germanic languages vary a bit in their attitude towards w; we Norwegians use it pretty much just as a fancy old-timey v and could frankly drop w from our alphabet without missing anything (just like q is practically never used).
Germans use w the way we use v, and then use v pretty much like f.
The anglo w sound is something we have to learn in English class, and even then a lot of people start to hypercorrect and pronounce even the "v"s in English as their w. It can be wery funny to listen to, or wery frustrating.
æ can then we also get œ as well?
How to pronounce Swedish umlauted vowels:
Å => how the British pronounce “awe”, “oo” in “floor”
Ä => how the Americans pronounce the “a” in “cat”
Ö => “ea” in “earl”, “yearn” or “u” in “turn”
Oh I’ll add the Estonian ones because we’ve got fun ones
Ü - pretty much does not exist in English, you might hear it in a weird dialect, apparently in the word “few” as spoken by scousers and some South Africans?
Õ - same preface, apparently you might hear a person from Cardiff pronounce “foot” this way or a southern USian might say “nut” this way, but I’ve never heard either.
Ö and Ä are the same as in Swedish and we do not have Å
So ä ö and ü are pronounced the same as in German?
Then i’d just have to learn how to say å and õ if I visit the Baltics or Scandinavia.
Yes, ü sounds like the ü in über and ö like Österreich at least. I’m not entirely sure about the German vs Estonian pronunciation of ä. Sounds closer to the ä in Käfer than the ä in Käse if you go to wiktionary and listen to the example pronunciations. I did study German in school because it sounded preferable to learning an entire new alphabet and recall the German ä was taught as sort of a cross between the Estonian ä and Estonian e, leaning towards one or the other depending on context, but then again I’m not sure how good my German teachers were, I know I only ever had two or three English teachers out of like 8 or 9 that actually spoke the language and knew how to pronounce words.
ik about Å because blåhaj :3
Yep!
Pronounced bloo-hi approximately
In danish it’s more like blaw-hai (but without the wauv from the w)
Don’t forget Þe letter ‘Þ’. It was an essential part of Þe English language, and one Þat actually makes sense.
I really don’t understand why we got rid of it! Why move toward using two letters in place of a single one? Þat’s just feaÞerbrained.
Imported types (ex. from the German states) for printing presses didn’t have it because it was an English only letter. Rather than coming up with expensive home modification (which some did anyway eventually but not en masse) there were easy alternatives because use of th was already established and also the letter y kind of looked like thorn in the fonts of the time so you could also sub that in.
Convenience of just doing a workaround rather than paying more money for a more English type modification won out and with so many using th and the thorn disappearing soon the use of the y that looked like thorn dropped out also.
It was because of the corruption and power welded by the type setters guild. Papers charged by the letter for adds, so one letter which could replace 2 was lost profits. So it had to go.
What made English the dominant language is not just because of colonisation, but also because the structure and rules are simpler than other languages. Adding those adds unnecessary complexities!
English
the structure and rules are simpler
¿¿¿?
I already use the former to describe the sound unambiguously.
Also, we need ɨ.
ɨɨɨɨɨɨɨɨɨɨɨɨɨɨɨɨɨɨɨɨɨɨɨ that’s the sound I make inbetween “no reaction” and laughing
We do technically use Ø for empty sets or as diameter in mathematics, and diacriticals are technically allowed in English but we really only use them to describe phonetics.
I could have sworn it had use in either spherical or polar coordinate systems but I guess I was misremembering.
You might be thinking of Theta: θ
Nah I think it was Phi throwing me off if anything.
I can þink of anoðer couple candidates.
There’s also thiſ.
The ‘long s’.
An f without the crossbar, ſ , sometimes more fully shaped at the bottom, like the integral symbol.
As best I can tell… linguists have not actually been able to figure out totally consistent rules for its usage, beyond ‘it replaces s, sometimes’.
It seems to pretty much be purely stylistic flair, everyone who did use it seems to have slightly different rules for how and in what circumstances they did. It tends to follow certain broader rules, but counterexamples can be found for most of them.
… I wonder if we could merge old/middle english characters and l33t sp33k.
ð4t aſſ B b0unc1n, æ’r3 d4y, æ’r3 9t
Just wait until you hear about end-of-word sigma, ς.
Or the insular r, ꞃ.
I learned about ſ from House of Leaves.
“ſtaires! We haue found ſtaires!”
The Constitution of the USA
The actual literal written document makes considerable use of ’ ſ ', this is from a rare typed version that does as well.
me on my way to eftablifh Juftice and fecure the Bleffings of Liberty to ourfelves
Aw, you have the sniffles?
God bleff you.
lolololol
Check those beautiful ligatures from long s to long s and from long s to t, and c to t.
no way. i knew it used the long S in the handwritten one, but i never knew there were typed versions. this is a find
Indeed it was, fetched a pretty penny via Sotheby’s auction.
Hilariously… was discovered during an estate sale (garage sale for rich people) in North Carolina.
Estate sales aren’t garage sales for rich people. They’re garage sales for dead people. Hence the word estate. It’s the estate of the deceased holding the sale, not the deceased. Legal bullshit mumbo gumbo, but there you have it
True, my mistake, I accidentally made a false e-statement.
i need to finish that one
It’s fun. I like ergodic literature.
Such good letters. I could never digest the fact that th can sound so different (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ
I don’t like either of these because they aren’t unique enough to easily speed read. The þ is a p and b and confuses my brain and the ð is just a little too small for the cross at the top on many fonts. At least ø and æ are unique enough to my eyes.
Yeah, good point.
I kan’t imagine living with that mecc.
Tho Đ/đ, Ŧ/ŧ are also cool, more historically accurate(thorn and eth were never as clean cut as we like to think) and fit the vibe of the english alphabet better.
There are too many letters already, there’s nothing c can do that k or s can’t.
Sheese? Kheese?
Tsheese
Tsiis
That’s how it’s spelled in Frisian
Hard milk
I’m in favor of replacing ch with just c, so you’d have a kappakuolo and ceese sandwic. That way, it isn’t redundant and we have fewer special cases.
Also, “x” is usually redundant with “ks”, so use it for what’s currently “sh” to eliminate another redundancy and another special case.
Add back the thorn and eth for “th” and use “f” instead of “ph” and consonants are actually pretty consistent.
But what if i want a keese sandwick? Or are we keeping the k and just ditcing ch?
Well, yeah, you need the “k” for the sounds it currently has. How else will you have kites or air konditioning?
kondixoning?
Good point.
I would say there are not enough letters. We have about 12-14 vowel monopthongs, but only 6 letters to represent vowels. No wonder everything’s a fucking mess! And that’s without even getting to diphthongs.
Q is also entirely useless.
That Q is actively detrimental
German has 29 too: äöü
You forgot the ß.
Right, we even bigger. Hehe
Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yer?
See the løveli lakes
The wonderful telephøne system
And mani interesting furry animals
Including the majestic møøse
deleted by creator
A Møøse once bit my sister …
No realli! She was Karving her initials on the møøse with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush given her by Svenge - her brother-in-law - an Oslo dentist and star of many Norwegian møvies: “The Høt Hands of an Oslo Dentist”, “Fillings of Passion”, “The Huge Mølars of Horst Nordfink”.
We apologise for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible have been sacked.
Mynd you, møøse bites Kan be pretty nasti …
We apologise again for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked.
Wait, the “o” in “holiday”, “lovely” sound different, so which is it?
The ø sounds more like an ö from German. In fact, Swedish uses the ö instead if the ø.
The monty python slides are just a humørous stylization, nothing more
Do they sound different in a Swedish accent?
No idea, but I’d expect the same letter to have the same pronunciation. On the flip side, you just proved that it’s not always the case haha
Neither actually. It sounds more like the e in permit or term, the u in uuh also gets close. They are not the most common sounds of the letter but I struggle to find analogous in English for the more common sound.
Why did I read this in the Swedish Chef’s accent?
Because you’ve never watched Monty Python I’d bet.
You could’ve watched Monty Python and still read it in the Swedish Chef’s accent.
I always read it in a Canadian accent, because I didn’t know what Swedish people sounded like when I watched it as a kid, so I just assumed they sound like Canadians. As is reasonable…
Akshually, ø and æ aren’t part of the Swedish alphabet. They’re Danish and Norwegian. In Swedish you have ä and ö; å is common to the three languages.
This change absolutely nothing, but now you’re able to distinguish Swedish and Norwegian at a glance!
Swedish doesn’t have the ø or the æ, it uses ö and ä instead.
The only one it shares with the other skandinavisk languages is å.
That being said, nice reference.
I don’t like that O thing because I write 0’s with the line through it
As a Norwegian, I find it annoying that they “stole” Ø for that purpose. I put a backslash through my zeros instead, so it looks different. I usually pick a coding font with dotted zeros for the same reason.
As a former math major, it annoys me because 0 and Ø are different concepts.
Wait, what.
… oh no. Nope.
Nope, not going back to set theory, it is 105F / ~40C right now, highly confident I would give myself heat stroke.
Your comment led me down a bit of a rabbit hole and I found this on Wikipedia:
When writing in languages such as Danish and Norwegian, where the empty set character may be confused with the alphabetic letter Ø (as when using the symbol in linguistics), the Unicode character U+29B0 ⦰ REVERSED EMPTY SET may be used instead.
It also mentions what you are alluding to:
In the past, “0” (the numeral zero) was occasionally used as a symbol for the empty set, but this is now considered to be an improper use of notation.
And, as a programmer, don’t get me started on nulls…or undefined…or truthyness.
add č it’s cool
Why not Š and Ž as well then?
they’re cool too, but č is cooler so it šould be added first
Because Size Matters!
æ cæn totally be used in English for the “short” a. Thæt’s the sound it’s used to write in Danish and Norwegian, ænd in the Internætional Phoenetic Ælphabet, which is used by linguists to precisely trænscribe speech.
I’m not sure about ø, though. It’s often used to write a sound thæt’s like the “e” in bet, but with your lips rounded like you’re pronouncing “oo” in boot. We don’t hæve thæt sound in English, unfortunately.
Isn’t ø just the Danish/Norwegian equivalent of the German ö?
In any case, it could be used to disambiguate words with different o sounds; i.e., “polish” (to shine a surface by rubbing) from “Pølish” (from Pøland).
I still occasionally use æ for encyclopædia, æon and æther if I’m feeling fancy.
