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From: minow@decvax.UUCP (Martin Minow)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat,sci.lang
Subject: Re: Change the software or the alphabet? (Swedish)
Message-ID: <182@decvax.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 8-Nov-87 13:45:29 EST
Article-I.D.: decvax.182
Posted: Sun Nov  8 13:45:29 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 10-Nov-87 05:36:08 EST
References: <1446@haddock.ISC.COM> <365@zuring.cwi.nl> <1924@kuukkeli.tut.fi> <18306@yale-celray.yale.UUCP>
Reply-To: minow@decvax.UUCP (Martin Minow)
Organization: Digital Eq. Corp. - Merrimack NH.
Lines: 25
Xref: mnetor comp.std.internat:311 sci.lang:1671

In article <18306@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> Bjorn Lisper (lisper@yale-celray.UUCP)
suggests that "All Swedish words can really be transcribed to 'English' form"
by replacing a-ring by 'aa', a-dieresis by 'ae', and o-dieresis by 'oe'.

Unfortunately, this will not work properly:

1. Many Finnish words are used in Swedish.  For example, the common Finnish
   name "Paavo" is pronounced with a long-a (as in father) sound, not with
   an 'o' (as in boat).  However P<aa>ve means "Pope"

2. Sequences of vowels become ambiguous.  For example, Sj<aa>are (dock-worker).
   Many of these sequences arise from Swedish compounding rules.  In
   general, a sequence of vowels will indicate a morepheme boundary.
   Turning these sequences into what appear to be trigraphs will cause
   confusion.

We can see examples of Bjorn's suggestion causing problems in modern Danish.
In 1948, Danish started using a-ring for the previously used 'aa' sequence.
Also, words beginning with a-ring were moved to the back of the alphabet,
*even* if they were written with 'aa.'  Thus, AAlborg (the town) was
alphabetized after 'Z'.  The one exception to this were foreign words,
such as from Finnish, with natural sequences of 'aa'.

Martin Minow
decvax!minow