From: gisle@ifi.uio.no (Gisle Hannemyr)
Subject: Re: Norwegian Alphabet (a-ring)
Organization: gisle@ifi.uio.no
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1992 12:05:29 GMT
Originator: gisle@drott.ifi.uio.no

>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.

>At one time we thought we had it.  Someone said the name is "volle"
>(which they also said means "little pancake").
This word is not in my Danish dictionary, nor has any of my Danish
friends heard about it.

>We sought confirmation
>and never found it.  Then we found a Danish woman who had immigrated to
>the US and is a librarian in Sunnyvale CA.  She remembered the Danish
>name for the little circle in Danish because it had just recently been
>adopted in Danish--"balle" meaning "bale" (not ball) and speculated that
>it had something to do with "tying together the two AAs that we used
>to use."  "Balle" sounded close to "volle" but we did not count it as
>confirmation.

>More recently a woman of Norwegian ancestry that works with my wife asked
>two visitors from Norway, a father and his son.  They got into quite a
>fight, one saying "prikke" the other "ringe".

>After 15 years, can anyone help us?

>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....

(( Below I used TeX notation for the the letter, a-ring i.e. \aa{}. ))

As a number of other posters have noted, your Swedish friends are
correct.  The ring does not really have a name in any Nordic language,
because it is not a diacritical mark.

This has not stopped ISO (for purely pragmatic reasons) to treat it as
a diacritical mark, and in the ISO 6937/2 standard, table 12, it is
denoted as "ring", and is listed along proper diacritics such as
"caron", "breve" and "diaeresis".  As an pendantic aside, I would like
to remind the scavenger hunters in Palo Alto that ISO documents in
most cases are the correct source for this type of information, and if
you are involved in internationalization issues you really need to be
familiar with ISO standards and terminology.

This, however, is soc.folklore.nordic, so let me return to the popular
terms used for the "ring" in Norway and Denmark.

The word I've heard used most often in Norway is "ring" (as in "ringen
over \aa{}-en").  "Prikk", I think, is only used to denote the dot
over the letter "i".

The suggestions you have from Danish sources ("volle" "balle")
reminded me of a discussion I recently had about the history of this
particular letter I had with my girlfriend's Danish parents (I mean,
what else is there to discuss with one's girlfriends parents?).  They
consistently referred to this letter as "bolle-\aa{}" -- which again
sounds similar to the words you have listed above.  "Bolle" is a
Danish word with a number of meanings, but in this context it is
probably the same as English "bun" (a type of soft, round sweetbread)
or "ball" (as in "meatball").  The word "bolle-\aa{}" was used to
distinguish the "a with a ring" graphmene from the the "proper AA" --
where two A's is used to write the same character.  My in-laws felt
that the latter was the correct Danish grapheme for that letter, and
the "bolle-\aa{}" was a disgusting novelty. So in Danish, one
colloquial term for the ring is "bolle".

Btw. -- the controversy about how to write this letter in Danish was
among the more subtle points in the Danish cinematic masterpiece:
"AArhus by night" (note the capitalization) that recently had a
run of four full days in one of Oslo's smallest cinema.
--
Disclaimer: My employer seldom even LISTENS to my opinion.
 
- gisle hannemyr  (Norsk Regnesentral)
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