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".
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.
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...
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'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 ",,,".
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
(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!")
"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
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.
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.
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.
That’s not the same sound. I tried thinking of words in English that would use the sound, but I couldn’t come up with one. If you think duh has the sound, then you’re not pronouncing “eu” correctly in French.
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.
Nah, the modification for keyboard is trivial. Other languages use alt+[closest base sign] to get special sign. So in polish it's s->ś or c->ć. The shortcut system is so convinient that it completely overshadowed dedicated layout.
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)
¿In this era of change, what are you waiting for? ¡I'm once again asking you to add starting exclamation and question marks to English to help disambiguate sentences and provide early cues to mood and voice!
æ cæn totally be used in English for the "short" a. Thæt's the sound it's used to write in Danish and Norwegian, ænd in the Internætional Phoenetic Ælphabet, which is used by linguists to precisely trænscribe speech.
I'm not sure about ø, though. It's often used to write a sound thæt's like the "e" in bet, but with your lips rounded like you're pronouncing "oo" in boot. We don't hæve thæt sound in English, unfortunately.
Isn’t ø just the Danish/Norwegian equivalent of the German ö?
In any case, it could be used to disambiguate words with different o sounds; i.e., “polish” (to shine a surface by rubbing) from “Pølish” (from Pøland).
English did historically use æ, as the Latin ae-ligature (along with œ), though it went out of fashion at around the end of the Victorian era, and may not have been used in American English except as a stylistic affectation.
English historically has not done vowel symbols other than AEIOU and the occasional Y, leaving the speaker to bloody well figure out themselves which vowel sound a letter represents in a specific word, leaving it free to use ligatures and diacriticals as accents (i.e. the archaic dieresis in “coördinate” informing the reader that the “oo” is not a “ooh” digraph, these days seen only in the New Yorker). In contrast, languages like German and the Scandinavian languages treat accented vowels as distinct vowels of their own, moving them to the end of the alphabet in the dictionary.
In contrast, languages like German and the Scandinavian languages treat accented vowels as distinct vowels of their own, moving them to the end of the alphabet in the dictionary.
In German, the umlaut is analysed alphabetically as a digraph of the base vowel plus "e", which is its ultimate source. The symbol became a diacritic mark through reduction of an "e" written above the vowel. I believe you're correct about Scandinavian languages though.
wasn't þere someone on fedi seriously and persistently trying to bring back þe þorn character? I just remember þey were always heavily down voted. Haven't seen þem in a while
I like what you were going for, but I'm pretty sure "that" is "ðat", and "þat" would be like "thot", but with an "a". I think.
The difference between them is ð is voiced, as in your throat is making sound and vibrating, whereas þ is voiceless, meaning it's just air and your throat is still, but the rest of your mouth is in the same shape.
This is similar to how, for my accent at least, "v" and "f" are the same mouth shape, and one is voiced and the other isn't.
I use "the thing" as a way to differentiate the sounds between the two characters, but I know almost nothing. Trying to learn a bit of Icelandic before I go there so I can pronounce the names of some of the places and be polite with locals.
We do technically use Ø for empty sets or as diameter in mathematics, and diacriticals are technically allowed in English but we really only use them to describe phonetics.
I could have sworn it had use in either spherical or polar coordinate systems but I guess I was misremembering.
It used to be part of the alphabet. We say "x, y, and z". But it used to be "x, y, z, and per se, and" which would be written like "XYZ&". So the alphabet had 27 characters in its recitation. And it's also where we get it's name. "and per se and" is shortened to "ampersand".
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!
250 replies
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" sound 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
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.
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
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?
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.
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
Oh wait, i thought elipses made of commas were a missclick lmao
Iirc, it began that way, but it's used now as like a softened ellipses.
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 try, it's just sometimes I get excited
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.
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.)
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.
https://youtu.be/s-mOy8VUEBk?is=2BNSlwJmpFlHmqRm
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
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!”
::: spoiler 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
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-forgotten-copy-of-the-constitution-discovered-in-a-filing-cabinet-could-sell-for-millions-180985060/
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.
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.
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.
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.
I kan't imagine living with that mecc.
Such good letters. I could never digest the fact that th can sound so different (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ
Where's the Lemmy user who unironically uses the thorn in all of their posts? You should hook up with that person!
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.
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.
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
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.
Yogthos?
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
Hard milk
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.
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.
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:
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
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?
Well, not if we wipe them off the earth, as Odin commands.
we already have that in "blåhaj" :3
Þhat's a great idea
Thhis
...
Whoops lol
lmao
YENNEL!!!
Þæt's*
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
In danish it's more like blaw-hai (but without the wauv from the w)
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.
Ænglø Sæxøn
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:
It also mentions what you are alluding to:
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.
Feel free to advocate for the superior Swedish equivalent: Ö
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.
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
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.
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.
well i cant read it
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.
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
lmao
Translation from... An older version of English? I'm pretty sure that distinction is not in the original Hebrew.
(good joke though)
"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.
Nø.
Å be like: "am i a joke to you?"
Å is what you say when you see an adorable animal
Å, så this is how we're tålking now?
in my head it's Foghorn Leghorn
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?
It's pronouncing the letter ö
Some people also use Ø as zero to differentiate from O's. Less common these days, but would still cause some confusion I bet.
James Maynard Keenan made this
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.
Danish guy here who actually has æ in the alphabet. It is pretty much pronounced like 'e' in bet.
In Norway it's more the 'a' in 'ash', which also is the English name for the letter
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!
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.
I'd argue as a sound it does exist, think of the 'uh' in 'duh'. But it doesn't have a single letter associated with it.
That’s not the same sound. I tried thinking of words in English that would use the sound, but I couldn’t come up with one. If you think duh has the sound, then you’re not pronouncing “eu” correctly in French.
Thinking the sound doesn't exist in English is quite the blunder
All hail the THORN Þ
@[email protected], you're our only hope.
"Not alone".
I still occasionally use æ for encyclopædia, æon and æther if I'm feeling fancy.
The Europeans will come for us, unless we get the Brits to do it
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.
Nah, the modification for keyboard is trivial. Other languages use alt+[closest base sign] to get special sign. So in polish it's s->ś or c->ć. The shortcut system is so convinient that it completely overshadowed dedicated layout.
And Å
https://youtu.be/f488uJAQgmw?is=Lg-V3Jfvig4fmF2j
German has
29 too30: äöüßEdit: forgot ß
You forgot the ß.
Right, we even bigger. Hehe
Søunds badæss.
add č it's cool
Why not Š and Ž as well then?
they're cool too, but č is cooler so it šould be added first
All should be added so we can stop with the confusing english spellings.
𐑲 𐑨𐑥 𐑨𐑕𐑒𐑦𐑙 𐑿 𐑑 𐑿𐑟 𐑭𐑯 𐑨𐑤𐑓𐑩𐑚𐑧𐑑 𐑞𐑨𐑑 𐑨𐑒𐑖𐑩𐑤𐑰 𐑥𐑱𐑒𐑕 𐑕𐑧𐑯𐑕 𐑓𐑸 𐑦𐑙𐑜𐑤𐑦𐑖.
You could start wið þ and ð: ðey look cool AND have clear use-cases
I'm not against but please let me just type th instead of having to copy paste that everytime.
Simply upgrade your keyboard
Lucky me, I access Lemmy almost exclusively with my smartphone with touchscreen ;)
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!
i like ä and ü and ö
Imagine signing your name and at the end you put the 2 dots on.
Zoës in shambles
I happen to be listening to autechre when I saw this.
Disappointed it's a different æ.
Oooohhh.... Is England asking to be invaded again? :D
Where's @Sxan when you need them?
@laurenceOfSuburbia
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7fT70eO4efs
¿In this era of change, what are you waiting for? ¡I'm once again asking you to add starting exclamation and question marks to English to help disambiguate sentences and provide early cues to mood and voice!
æ cæn totally be used in English for the "short" a. Thæt's the sound it's used to write in Danish and Norwegian, ænd in the Internætional Phoenetic Ælphabet, which is used by linguists to precisely trænscribe speech.
I'm not sure about ø, though. It's often used to write a sound thæt's like the "e" in bet, but with your lips rounded like you're pronouncing "oo" in boot. We don't hæve thæt sound in English, unfortunately.
The u in burn comes pretty close to an ø.
Isn’t ø just the Danish/Norwegian equivalent of the German ö?
In any case, it could be used to disambiguate words with different o sounds; i.e., “polish” (to shine a surface by rubbing) from “Pølish” (from Pøland).
More like a schwa in Norwegian. I'm not sure about Danish.
English did historically use æ, as the Latin ae-ligature (along with œ), though it went out of fashion at around the end of the Victorian era, and may not have been used in American English except as a stylistic affectation.
English historically has not done vowel symbols other than AEIOU and the occasional Y, leaving the speaker to bloody well figure out themselves which vowel sound a letter represents in a specific word, leaving it free to use ligatures and diacriticals as accents (i.e. the archaic dieresis in “coördinate” informing the reader that the “oo” is not a “ooh” digraph, these days seen only in the New Yorker). In contrast, languages like German and the Scandinavian languages treat accented vowels as distinct vowels of their own, moving them to the end of the alphabet in the dictionary.
In German, the umlaut is analysed alphabetically as a digraph of the base vowel plus "e", which is its ultimate source. The symbol became a diacritic mark through reduction of an "e" written above the vowel. I believe you're correct about Scandinavian languages though.
wasn't þere someone on fedi seriously and persistently trying to bring back þe þorn character? I just remember þey were always heavily down voted. Haven't seen þem in a while
ive seen þat several places. Apparently the german printing press didnt add it so it fell out of use.
I think it would confuse people tbh because there's þ and ð.
ðis is soft, like breaðe
þat isnt, like þink
th replaced boð
I like what you were going for, but I'm pretty sure "that" is "ðat", and "þat" would be like "thot", but with an "a". I think.
The difference between them is ð is voiced, as in your throat is making sound and vibrating, whereas þ is voiceless, meaning it's just air and your throat is still, but the rest of your mouth is in the same shape.
This is similar to how, for my accent at least, "v" and "f" are the same mouth shape, and one is voiced and the other isn't.
I use "the thing" as a way to differentiate the sounds between the two characters, but I know almost nothing. Trying to learn a bit of Icelandic before I go there so I can pronounce the names of some of the places and be polite with locals.
Bringing back porn character? Sign me up.
https://youtu.be/f488uJAQgmw
Came to the comments to post this. Am-english could at least use the ae.
Because Size Matters!
@laurenceOfSuburbia
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z-vOpI97h7I&t=1s&pp=2AEBkAIB
Fuck no.
Keep ae away from my mono-fonts.
We do technically use Ø for empty sets or as diameter in mathematics, and diacriticals are technically allowed in English but we really only use them to describe phonetics.
I could have sworn it had use in either spherical or polar coordinate systems but I guess I was misremembering.
You might be thinking of Theta: θ
Nah I think it was Phi throwing me off if anything.
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
Æeeeee lmaø
I came to ask, do you extend the Æ by going Æeee or Ææææ?
… fůůůů
Yæh
@laurenceOfSuburbia
word 👌
We need to start with &. It wasn't that long ago that it got removed.
ampersands are still everywhere, what do you mean?
It used to be part of the alphabet. We say "x, y, and z". But it used to be "x, y, z, and per se, and" which would be written like "XYZ&". So the alphabet had 27 characters in its recitation. And it's also where we get it's name. "and per se and" is shortened to "ampersand".
køøl
Would be låvely if English speakers finally lørn hæw the letters æctually sæond?
Relevant @RobWords: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJxKyh9e5_A
I'm all for the æ/Æ
Seconded.
I don't think ae is pronounced like that. Isn't it pronounced a as in ant and Annie?
More like the e in egg
Two more letters to name programming languages after!
Someone to create Oslashlang with me?
You would add æ and not œ ? Sacrilege !
K, let's just dump all phonetic symbols
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!
¿¿¿?
Hmmm. Is this a red-flag that OP is starting down the alt-right rabbit hole? I'm suspicious of letters with lines through them, etc...anymore.
Letters have had strokes and points and hats in them for thousands of years before some fascistoid adopted them for fake internet cool factor.