From: pem@Minsk.DoCS.UU.SE (Per-Erik Martin)
Subject: Re: Norwegian Alphabet
Organization: Student
Date: Mon, 7 Sep 1992 22:48:42 GMT


>   For about 15 years there has been a scavenger hunt* in Silicon Valley
>   to find the word in Norwegian that is the name for the little circle
>   above the A in the character (some character, I don't know then
>   name of the character either) that starts the name of Angstrom.
>
>   The hunt was started when Prof Donald Knuth of Stanford could not 
>   find the name to include in a book he was writing about type setting.
>   It then became an adventure to find out if we could help him discover 
>   the name.  Calling the "Norwegian Academy" if such an analog of the 
>   French Academy exists, would be too easy.  We have to ask Norwegian
>   (or other Scandinavian) friends, look in Norwegian/English dictionaries,
>   ...

Why the Norwegian name? Both the letter and the person who named the unit
Angstrom are Swedish. The letter was adopted in Norwegian and Danish in
this century.
Anders Jonas Angstrom (Aangstroem/]ngstr|m), 1814-74, was a physicist at
Uppsala University in Sweden (where I am now, btw :-).
Btw, there is a Swedish Academy, modelled after the French. Don't know about
Norway.

>
>   P.S.  when we ask Swedish friends about the name in Norwegian (the real
>   goal of the hunt) and about the name in Swedish, they get very angry.
>   They assert that it has no name in Swedish; that it is not like a 
>   tilde in Spanish that is separate and has a name, but is like the 
>   the bottom bar you add to an F to make it an E, there is nothing you
>   add to an F to make an E; there are just two characters that look quite
>   similar, neither was derived from the other....
>

No reason getting angry, but they're right. All those other marks, tilde,
circumflex etc., are diacritical marks. They live their own life and can
be added to different letters in different languages to change the phonetical
value of the letter (or maybe the stress of the word?).
In Swedish we have three letters which very often are mistakenly assumed to
have diacritical marks by foreigners, but in fact they have not.
They appear last in our alphabet, in the order they were introduced:

Aa (an 'a' with a small circle above) was introduced in the 15'th century
and has been a separate letter since then. I think it started off as a
double 'a' where the second letter eventually shrunk was placed on top off
the first one. The little circle is never used on any other letter, and has
no special name (except the obvious "ring" or "cirkel" (circle)); it's simply
part of the whole letter.
The letter was introduced in a spelling reform in Norwegian in 1917 and in 
Danish in 1948, to replace the old 'aa' (according to "Bra B|ckers Lexikon").

A" (an 'A' with two dots above, often transcribed as 'ae') started off as
it's transcription, where the second 'e' shrunk and was placed on top off
the 'a'. It appeared in the 16th century in Swedish. Again it's a separate
letter in the alphabet (and it's not an "umlaut" in the sense it's used in
German). You will also find it in Finnish and Estonian.
In Norway and Denmark they use a ligature, 'ae'.

O" (an 'O' with two dots, often transcribed as 'oe') also started off as
two letters, the same way as 'ae', and appeared about the same time.
You also find it in German, Finnish, Hungarian and Turkish.
In Norwegian and Danish they write it with a slash (/) across the 'o'.

I have a xerox of an old book printed in 1611 where they still write a" and
o" as a/o with very small e's on the top. In Swedish handwriting you often
see something that looks like a tilde (~) instead of the two dots.
As for the names of the dots on A" and O", it's the same as for the circel in
Aa, they don't have any special name except the obvious, they're just dots.

It's hard to describe the pronounciation of these letters in words, but I'll
give it a try anyway:

Aa: If it's long it's similar to the vowel in English 'saw'.
    If it's short it's like in Eng. 'long'. ;-)

A": Long: I give up on this one. Someone suggested something like in
          French 'chaise'. (I don't speak French so I wouldn't know.)
    Short: Something like Eng. 'carry' maybe?

O": Long: Something like in Eng. "bird".
    Short: Don't know. Try pronouncing "bird" with a very short vowel if
           you can... ;)


(PS. My guess is that the Finnish and Estonian A" and O" came from Swedish,
 but I don't know about the other languages where they are used. Their
 similar appearances may be coincidental in some cases, even if they are
 used for similar sounds. DS)

--
 |\/|\/|\/| Per-Erik Martin,
 |  |  |/\| Department of Computer Systems, Uppsala University,
 |/\|  |  | Email: pem@minsk.DoCS.UU.SE
Newsgroups: soc.culture.nordic