As a Danish guy, please don’t. I get confused enough when you mash æ, ø, or å into random words.
Kamelåså?
Cygelkule!
Spisniegel!
TrϾkert?
You just ordered 1000L of milk.
As a Danish man you need to tell me how much truth there is to this. Please.
There’s some truth to it but I can’t say if it is unique to Denmark. There’s some phrasings and words used in Jutland that’s completely foreign for people in Zealand. We also have our fringe dialects that are closer to being an entirely different language.
But what is true is that Danish puts way less emphasis on consonants and endings of words are often “swallowed” so to say, so for Norwegians and Swedes it might seem that we have a speech impediment at best. A joke in Scandinavia is that the easiest way to learn Danish is to learn Swedish and put a potato in your mouth while you speak.
Reading the header with Norwegian eyes was horrible, and it took way too long for me to actually see what they were trying to say
Stop. You’re going to attract the thorn person. This is chum in the water for them.
Eww - wonder how much he’s been blocked.
I think they’re in this post already because I did see someone using it earlier.
You used to see them in every thread doing it, though. I can’t be bothered to confirm or remember their username.
Φuck that.
Where’s the Lemmy user who unironically uses the thorn in all of their posts? You should hook up with that person!
I got annoyed at that, so I just set up a replace on every web page that I open to change the thorn to a th. Haven’t even thought about it until seeing your post.
I know who you’re referring to, but I haven’t seen them in a while.
The supposed justification was that it fucked up AI scraping, which I think was bullshit. Seemed like more of a hipster thing.
Saw them just the other day and asked them wtf was a worb.
Edit, here it is:
It’s the sequel to Morbius - Worbius.
The anti-anti-hero.
Þ is þe coolest
For some reason I only read it as a lisp. Or a waaay over pronounced TH, like cartoonish, think daffy duck.
Yæs plæse
Yogthos?
The þ þing? That’s really cool to have around.
I for one would love to see English gain a bit of Frenchoise nose-up with ç.
Þhat’s a great idea
Thhis
…
Whoops lol
lmao
YENNEL!!!
Þæt’s*
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)
The a in anyone is actually pronounced like æ. Unlike the a in hand.
The ø, however, is nothing like the o in one. It’s more like the eu in French, but doesn’t exist in English sounds. The Daniel word bøh (meaning boo) or øh (meaning uhm), does sound like the ir in bird, but that’s a rare pronounciation of ø that depends on the h.
I’d argue as a sound it does exist, think of the ‘uh’ in ‘duh’. But it doesn’t have a single letter associated with it.
That’s not the same sound. I tried thinking of words in English that would use the sound, but I couldn’t come up with one. If you think duh has the sound, then you’re not pronouncing “eu” correctly in French.
Thinking the sound doesn’t exist in English is quite the blunder
Many people can’t handle the existing alphabet, imagine for a second if they have to deal with extra letters.
Folks can’t handle the current alphabet because it’s being used in the shittiest way possible
Multi-century archaic spelling, preserved spellings in loaned words despite the sounds being different, hell there was a point where Big Dictionary was shoehorning random letters into words to make them more adjacent to their latin counterparts
By all means you could triple the amount of letters in the alphabet and make it work, but as of now it’s kinda just the worst case of sunk-cost to ever exist
In English extra letters could solve a problem as many letters are pronounced differently depending on context making it not very intuitive to spell some words.
It’s a menace for somone who grew with phonetically consistent language
That would be kind of going against language’s natural evolution. Many words used to be spelled with way more letters than they are today.
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?
Danes will be confused.
Well, not if we wipe them off the earth, as Odin commands.
we already have that in “blåhaj” :3
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.
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.
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.
You can keep all the rest. I just want Þ (thorn). It represents þe “th” sound in English. Gimmie!!!
Well, it represents at least one of the th sounds for English at least. Bring back eth too! (Ð/ð)
Ðey’re boþ great letters
You can’t do too much and expect to be successful. Let’s just start with þ to get everyone used to it. Remember, things like Þis can take 100 years or more to be permanent.
If we’re mucking the alphabet, though, we really should bring back the thorn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)
(If for no other reason than to also bring back the you/thou formal/informal split so I get fewer stares when I point out that the best translation of Exodus 20:13 is really more like “hey, man, no murders!”)
using that letter thorn becomes ‘þorn’ lmao
lmao
Translation from… An older version of English? I’m pretty sure that distinction is not in the original Hebrew.
(good joke though)
æ is already in the English alphabet though.
How do you pronounce it?
I say AAAAIEEEEE!
All* the Old English characters are named with the sound they make, almost all of them starting with that sound. Æ is called Ash, and it makes the ah sound.
- As English goes, there is of course, one exception.
Danish guy here who actually has æ in the alphabet. It is pretty much pronounced like ‘e’ in bet.
In Norway it’s more the ‘a’ in ‘ash’, which also is the English name for the letter
I still occasionally use æ for encyclopædia, æon and æther if I’m feeling fancy.
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
All should be added so we can stop with the confusing english spellings.
