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
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.
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.
43 upvotes…
Wait, the “o” in “holiday”, “lovely” sound different, so which is it?
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.
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
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
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…
Did it have anything to do with this?
F U N E X?
S, V F X.
We can’t even get people to spell correctly with the letters we have.
Capitalization, and punctuation are being lost because it’s slightly inconvenient on a phone keyboard to include them. Anything outside of lowercase a-z is too hard now. Good luck getting anyone to shift the keyboard to find other characters.
I try, it’s just sometimes I get excited
No? If anything, the frequent typing of text on phone keyboards in online interactions has created even more intricacies to language; as now we are used to not only using the proper methods of capitalisation and punctuation marks to convey meaning, but also to intentionally leaving them out or distorting them to convey more meaning or emotion. Phone keyboards can auto correct, auto capitalise and add punctuation to sentences for you. People go out of their way to disable those and intentionally type “incorrect” sentences because “On my way!” vs “on my way”/“omw” just don’t feel the same.
Also, not bothering to type “proper” sentences while texting your friends on a phone keyboard doesnt mean you start to just forget that sentences begin with a capitalised letter and end with a dot lol. Furthermore English is just a stupid language with stupid spelling and pronunciation rules. The concept of the spelling bee was really shocking to me when I first heard about it as a non-native speaker becuase most other languages just… are easier with spelling.
edit: some people really are just basically illiterate though (see what I did there? no capitalisation.)
wi kan’t ivən get piipəl tö spell kərrektlii wið þe lettərz wi hav.
kapitalayzeyšən, and pⱥnctueyšən ar biyiƞ lost bükoz i’c slaytli inkonvinyənt on ə fown kiiybord tu inklud ðəm. eniþüƞ awtsayd ov lowərkeys a-z iz tuu hard naw. göd lⱥk gettiƞ eniwⱥn tu šüft ðe kiiybord tö faynd ⱥðəə karakterz.
Where’s the Lemmy user who unironically uses the thorn in all of their posts? You should hook up with that person!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Just wait until you hear about end-of-word sigma, ς.
Or the insular r, ꞃ.
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.
Ŧo Đ/đ, Ŧ/ŧ are also cool, more historically accurate(thorn and eth were never as clean cut as we like to ŧink) and fit the vibe of đe english alphabet better.
Edit: actually used đ and ŧ to show them in use.
Such good letters. I could never digest the fact that th can sound so different (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ
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.
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?
we already have that in “blåhaj” :3
Danes will be confused.
Well, not if we wipe them off the earth, as Odin commands.
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
There are too many letters already, there’s nothing c can do that k or s can’t.
Sheese? Kheese?
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.
Edit: I can’t believe I forgot ditching the soft “g” and “s”, so it’d actually be ceeze.
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.
For me it helps speaking other languages, because once you do it no longer matter whether each sound has it’s own letter. Every language, afaik, has a unique sound while all languages I know share the Latin alphabet which really makes it a lot easier to learn that language. I don’t think life would improve if each sound had an exclusive letter.
Tsheese
Tsiis
That’s how it’s spelled in Frisian
thing is, c can do both or either, k and s can do one. most folk i have talked to about seriously reforming english spelling/alphabetization eliminate k’s current function entirely and put everything it does on c
Q is also entirely useless.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That would be kind of going against language’s natural evolution.
If you can live with horrible changes like million-milliard-billion-biliard changed to million-billion-trillion-quadrillion you can do actually convenient changes.
Every other language except English does it the old way. And translating one system to another is a garbage experience
It’s a menace for somone who grew with phonetically consistent language
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.
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.
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.
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.
Feel free to advocate for the superior Swedish equivalent: Ö
Hopefully with no apostrophe after them. Those things are endangered, you know.
Just start your own language. ænglish
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!”)
Translation from… An older version of English? I’m pretty sure that distinction is not in the original Hebrew.
(good joke though)
using that letter thorn becomes ‘þorn’ lmao
lmao
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.
