• petersr@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Look, if you add æ and ø you also have to add å, otherwise Danes will be confused.

      • esa@discuss.tchncs.de
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        3 days ago

        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.

        • MinnesotaGoddam@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          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.

          • esa@discuss.tchncs.de
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            3 days ago

            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.