Re: OT: Unicode 5.0

Henrik Theiling skrev:

> Right, of course -- I've used that, too, yes.  (It did not come to my
> mind in my previous post, though).  _ao_ ligature would be perfect,
> because many people use _ao_ for Lower German now, I think, and making
> it a ligature would only slightly change the appearance while
> indicating a monophthong.
>
> Indeed, _å_ will probably be pronounced correctly without further
> explanations, at least I've heard many Germans mispronounce Swedish in
> using [O] instead of [o], which shows that the character is at least
> distinguished. :-)
Actually I've read that _å_ was adopted into Swedish from Low German
in the 16. century.  I don't know how widespread or consistently used
it was in Low German at that time however.

FWIW I think _å_ goes best with _ä ö ü_ while _ao_ ligature goes best
with _æ, ø, œ_ and _y_ or _ue_ ligature.  IMNSHO the current Swedish
system with _y å ä ö_ is horrible.

As for Swedish /o/ spelled _o_ that occurs where /o/ descends from
Old Swedish short /o/ rather than Old Swedish /a:/, although some
words like _fågel_ (Old Swedish _fugl_ or _fogl_) have the wrong
spelling from an etymological POV.  Many dialects have a different
phoneme /3\/ for Old Swedish short /o/, so that e.g. _kol_ 'coal'
and _kål_ 'cabbage' are differentiated in pronunciation.  In fact
Stocholm upper society used to be ridiculed for this merger and
it was explicitly blamed on German influence.  There were other
etymological distinctions such as /r`/ for *rD and /w/ for _hv_
which went the same way.
--


/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

    "Maybe" is a strange word.  When mum or dad says it
    it means "yes", but when my big brothers say it it
    means "no"!

                            (Philip Jonsson jr, age 7)