• current@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    Tbh I don’t know why people say Blahaj instead of Blaahaj. The second is the “correct” way to differentiate Å and A if you don’t have diacritics. I would think it would be spelled “AO” instead since it’s literally just an A with a lowercase O on top, like how German vowel letters with umlauts (Ä Ö Ü Ÿ) are spelled with an E at the end (AE OE UE YE) when you don’t have diacritics available (since umlauts originated as a lowercase E above a letter). Or like how in Spanish the “correct” way to write Ñ without diacritics is to stick an N at the end like “NN”.* But who knows what goes on in the minds of Swedish people… I’m pretty sure most of them don’t even know that you’re allegedly supposed to write “Å” as “AA”.

    *fun fact: the tilde was previously a lowercase “N” above a letter used in Latin & post-Latin Romance languages to replace a following nasal “n/m” after any letter (e.g. Latin “Manu” -> “Mãu” -> Portuguese “Mão”, Latin “Rationes” -> Portuguese/Galician “Razões”/“Rações”/“Rasões”, Latin “annus” -> Spanish “anno” -> Spanish “año”) but it has been reduced to only the letters Ñ in Spanish and Ã/Õ in Portuguese

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      like how German vowel letters with umlauts (Ä Ö Ü Ÿ) are spelled with an E at the end (AE OE UE YE)

      There’s no Ypsilon Umlaut, in fact y basically only occurs in loanwords nowadays, it was used instead of i quite a bit in previous spelling versions and names are conservative, thus those stuck around (Bayern, Mayer, etc). Likewise, Goethe is still Goethe it’s an Umlaut but never spelled with ö, the th also isn’t in use any more according to modern spelling it’d be Göhte.

      Then there’s the ß which by now at least has a capital version but the Duden still didn’t get around to changing the replacement form from ss to sz.

      You also occasionally see ë and ï those aren’t Umlauts but French-style diaresis, signifying that the vowel combination they’re in isn’t a diphthong. Alëuten, Piëch, Zitrön.

      • current@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        Some people in my family line (a long time ago mind you) had “ÿ” in their surname, it came from a Russian name with “Се” (or maybe it came from the Polish counterpart spelled with “Sie”?) which they spelled with “Sÿ”. Apparently the letter was used in German writing occasionally around that time period. I thought that was pretty interesting.