• atcorebcor@sh.itjust.works
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    15 hours ago

    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.

  • Griffus@lemmy.zip
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    14 hours ago

    Would be låvely if English speakers finally lørn hæw the letters æctually sæond?

  • VonReposti@feddit.dk
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    1 day ago

    As a Danish guy, please don’t. I get confused enough when you mash æ, ø, or å into random words.

  • SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    Where’s the Lemmy user who unironically uses the thorn in all of their posts? You should hook up with that person!

  • kamen@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Many people can’t handle the existing alphabet, imagine for a second if they have to deal with extra letters.

    • Kennystillalive@feddit.org
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      22 hours ago

      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.

      • kamen@lemmy.world
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        19 hours ago

        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.

        • BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world
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          14 hours ago

          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

    • ReHomed@lemmy.cafe
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      1 day ago

      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

  • db2@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    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

    • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
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      1 day ago

      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.

    • zloubida@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      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!

      • OS2Warp@lemmy.zip
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        2 days ago

        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”.

      • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
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        1 day ago

        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

      • GojuRyu@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        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.

        • tuxiqae@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          2 days ago

          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

        • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
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          1 day ago

          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…

  • Bluewing@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    You can keep all the rest. I just want Þ (thorn). It represents þe “th” sound in English. Gimmie!!!

  • VibeSurgeon@piefed.social
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    2 days ago

    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”

    • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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      2 days ago

      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

      • Noobnarski@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        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.

        • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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          2 days ago

          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.

  • TrackinDaKraken@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    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.

    • Dharma Curious (he/him)@slrpnk.net
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      2 days ago

      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.

        • Alaknár@sopuli.xyz
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          2 days ago

          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.

    • MrKoyun@lemmy.world
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      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.)

    • TheThunderWolf@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 day ago

      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.

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Don’t forget Þe letter ‘Þ’. It was an essential part of Þe English language, and one Þat actually makes sense.

    • butWhatIfiCan@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      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.

      • Nautalax@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        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.

      • Typotyper@sh.itjust.works
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        2 days ago

        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.