top 97 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] 79 points 3 months ago (18 children)

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

  • source
  • hideshow 18 child comments
  • [–] 53 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    A Møøse once bit my sister ..

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 21 points 3 months ago* (3 children)

    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".

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 15 points 3 months ago* (2 children)

    We apologise for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible have been sacked.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 31 points 3 months 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!

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Why did I read this in the Swedish Chef’s accent?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Because you've never watched Monty Python I'd bet.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    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...

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago* (4 children)

    Wait, the "o" in "holiday", "lovely" sound different, so which is it?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 4 points 3 months 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.

  • source
  • parent
  • load more comments (1 reply)
    [–] 25 points 3 months ago (8 children)

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

  • source
  • hideshow 8 child comments
  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago (4 children)
  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    As a Danish man you need to tell me how much truth there is to this. Please.

    https://youtu.be/s-mOy8VUEBk?is=2BNSlwJmpFlHmqRm

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago

    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.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 20 points 3 months ago (10 children)

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

  • source
  • hideshow 10 child comments
  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    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.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 15 points 3 months ago (15 children)

    There are too many letters already, there’s nothing c can do that k or s can’t.

  • source
  • hideshow 15 child comments
  • [–] 15 points 3 months ago (10 children)
  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (5 children)

    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.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    But what if i want a keese sandwick? Or are we keeping the k and just ditcing ch?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Well, yeah, you need the "k" for the sounds it currently has. How else will you have kites or air konditioning?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    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.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago

    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.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 13 points 3 months ago* (6 children)

    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"

  • source
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    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

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    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.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 3 points 3 months 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.

  • source
  • parent
  • [+] 10 points 3 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago (6 children)

    I don't like that O thing because I write 0's with the line through it

  • source
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    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.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 12 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    As a former math major, it annoys me because 0 and Ø are different concepts.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago

    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.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago (1 child)

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

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 4 points 3 months 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

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 29 points 3 months ago (8 children)

    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.

  • source
  • hideshow 8 child comments
  • [–] 28 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    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.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Oh wait, i thought elipses made of commas were a missclick lmao

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months 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.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 1 point 3 months 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.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago*

    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.)

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 14 points 3 months ago (9 children)

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

  • source
  • hideshow 9 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    does ø have a name? just o with a line or what

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    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.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

    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.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 3 points 3 months 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.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Stop. You're going to attract the thorn person. This is chum in the water for them.

  • source
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago

    "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.

  • source
  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago
    load more comments
    view more: next ›