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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!
Wait, the “o” in “holiday”, “lovely” sounds different, so which is it?
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
43 upvotes…
F U N E X?
S, V F X.
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.
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?
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.
Check those beautiful ligatures from long s to long s and from long s to t, and c to t.
me on my way to eftablifh Juftice and fecure the Bleffings of Liberty to ourfelves
Aw, you have the sniffles?
God bleff you.
lolololol
i need to finish that one
It’s fun. I like ergodic literature.
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
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.
Fundamentally disagree. Look at how often people use emoji, AlTerNaTiNg CaSe, and other tricks to convey meaning online (and mainly from their phones). English is not losing complexity, it’s not being dumbed down, or becoming simpler because people are typing on a touch screen. It’s evolving in real time because the methods of communication are evolving. 300 years ago we capitalized nouns in English for emphasis on important nouns, some people capitalized all nouns like in German, we used punctuation quite differently. Before that, we used these big, chunky symbols to indent our lines and make them more readable (and then we got rid of the symbols, but kept the indents, and that’s why we indent the first line of a paragraph). We used to use 3 little stars (an asterism) to break paragraphs apart. Emoji, alternating case, ellipses made of commas, weird punctuation uses, capitalization forgone to convey a flat tone, periods missed at the end of a sentence to give it a friendlier tone, all of these things are living, real grammar rules. They’re just not the same ones as in the text books. Much like how AAVE is not taught in schools as correct or proper English, but it has its own grammar rules that are consistent among its users, the way people type now is fairly consistent, and follows a series of rules that have been agreed upon in the same way that any language agrees upon its rules.
English got frozen in time because of the printing press, and we all just assumed it had been the way it was for so long that that’s the way it was, English was set. But languages are constantly evolving, and there’s really no such thing as a correct way to write a living language. There is only the way we currently write it, which is constantly changing. Normally that change is fairly slow, but we with virtually every other aspect of humanity, the computer, the Internet, the smartphone, and other rapid technological changes increases the speed at which we adopt new cultural norms exponentially.
It’s also worth noting that we write more now that we ever have before. In the past, you may occasionally write letters, jot something down on a postcard or a birthday card, have a weekly shopping list, or a note from a phone call, but apart from secretaries taking short hand, stenographers, and other specialized careers involving writing specifically, the average person did not write anywhere near as much as the average millennial or Gen z, who may communicate exclusively through text, email, discord, whatever, with their friends on a daily basis. With more writing, it follows that the language will evolve faster. A short lived species will often demonstrate more mutation and variation than a longer lived species. There are just more generations to work with. Every email, every Facebook post, every text message is a potential for a random mutation in the language, and without the strict confines of previous generations telling us that something must be written in a certain way, because the primary purpose of writing in the past was much more professional and academic, much less casual, those mutations are given a chance to survive and to flourish.
Yeah, sometimes it is genuinely hard for me to read posts made by younger Gen z or Gen alpha, and it is especially hard to read posts that are trying to mimic the gen z/alpha posts but from older generations, but I am legitimately excited to see how English evolves without the confines or academic interference. I can almost imagine a high/low English split coming, and that’s exciting.
I like your way better
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.
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.
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
Hard milk
Q is also entirely useless.
That Q is actively detrimental
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.
How to pronounce Swedish umlauted vowels:
Å => how the British pronounce “awe”
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)
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.
Hopefully with no apostrophe after them. Those things are endangered, you know.
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.
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
“æ” was used in Old English to write the exact sound that “a” represents in most Americans’ pronunciation of the word “cat”, with “a” representing a distinct vowel. Old English had a few other fun letters - a bunch of people have heard of “þ” (thorn) but there was also “ƿ” (wynn) which had a sound value like “w” in modern English.
I down with æ, but me and all my homies hate ø because it’s so negative looking, like, why can’t we enter there, ø, who made you the alphabetic gatekeeper?
I nominate ů instead. Look at that angelic little halo. But I’d accept ű as a metal af alternative \m/ little ű
I nominate ö
Ö
Surprised, or singing Bohemian Rhapsody?
Some people also use Ø as zero to differentiate from O’s. Less common these days, but would still cause some confusion I bet.
deleted by creator
Ænglø Sæxøn
Nø.
Can I get a §houtout to whatever you call this thing?
That’s the section symbol.
Oh, you mean the §ection §ymbol? I first saw it used in The Sims for §imoleans.
I somehow managed to both use my first word processor program and play the Sims 1 at almost the same time, so … its both, but I prefer calling it the Simolean symbol.
And if you disagree, well, kra gee narwok, habadu ba blingblong.
Pretty sure I did too!
𐑢𐑲 𐑯𐑪𐑑 𐑖𐑱𐑝𐑾𐑯? 𐑦𐑑𐑕 𐑐𐑼𐑓𐑧𐑒𐑑 𐑓 𐑦𐑙𐑜𐑤𐑦𐑖!
Why not Shavian? It’s perfect for English!
How do I type shavian? Is there an android keyboard? That’s so cool. I’ve read about it, but never actually considered if it was typeable realistically.
You can use an app named Keyman, there are three layouts.
More info here.
Too cool! Thank you!
Theres the keyman app, and recently the futo keyboard if you want a more modern-style keyboard. Id reccommend the futo one because of the larger number of festures, but its up to you.
FUTO software it’s sooo good, but sadly their license sucks. It’s just source available and technically not FLOSS.
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.
using that letter thorn becomes ‘þorn’ lmao
