Some of those are kind of hard to learn to write. Then we need more characters on keyboard or use special keys. I had a really hard time learning English and typing on it. I really dont need more struggles.
Where’s the Lemmy user who unironically uses the thorn in all of their posts? You should hook up with that person!
add č it’s cool
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.
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.
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
I still occasionally use æ for encyclopædia, æon and æther if I’m feeling fancy.
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.
German has
29 too30: äöüßEdit: forgot ß
You forgot the ß.
Right, we even bigger. Hehe
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
Translation from… An older version of English? I’m pretty sure that distinction is not in the original Hebrew.
(good joke though)
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!
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.
Oh wait, i thought elipses made of commas were a missclick lmao
I’m almost certain that earlier versions of iOS exposed the comma on the main keyboard and hid the period under the symbols button, because double-tapping space added it.
Which meant that, depending on version, you’d sometimes need to tap 6 times to write “…” (to enter the symbols keyboard mode after every period, since it would go back to the primary set every time), and only 3 to write “,”.
But I might be wrong.
I like your way better
I try, it’s just sometimes I get excited
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
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!
43 upvotes…
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.
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
Why did I read this in the Swedish Chef’s accent?
Because you’ve never watched Monty Python I’d bet.
Also Þorn and Ðis þing, which i do not know ðe name of. (Really, id prefer Shavian, but ðat would require significantly more work to get people to switch)
It’s a thorn, the confusion of which with a Y is the origin of ‘Ye Olde Pub’.
the parent comment said thorn. I think the one he meant he didn’t know the name of is instead eth.
Yep, thsts the one! Thank you!
Just start your own language. ænglish
Ænglø Sæxøn
