• esa@discuss.tchncs.de
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    4 days ago

    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.

    • MinnesotaGoddam@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      4 days ago

      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.

      • esa@discuss.tchncs.de
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        4 days 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.