Re: O-ogonek

At 11:29 08.5.2000 +0100, James Campbell wrote:
>In Norwegian (and Danish, I believe), æ ø å ... I remember it as Ænd Øf Åll
>(End Of All).
>Swedish has å ä ö, and in Finnish also ä and ö are sorted at the end of the
>alphabet.
>But what of Icelandic and Faeroese? How do they sort their extras?
Actually the order in DA and NO is æ ø å, but in SV and FI the order is å ä
ö, so in a way the complete order ought to be æ ø å ä ö...  The FI language
doesn't use å, but it is part of its alphabet, since many Finns have SV
surnames containing it.
         IS has ð between d and e but þ æ ö after z in that order, while
áéíúý are either sorted together with their unaccented counterparts (which
used to be the more common) or separately after them (a á b c d ð e é...
which is now the more common.)  ON dictionaries normally have ...z þ æ œ ø
ö -- where ö of course is a substitute for the hooked o, and a handy one,
in agreement with modern IS orthography.

It is not quite correct, BTW, to say that ON ö was the same as modern å;
rather the value of u-umlauted a and á was low back unrounded (as the vowel
in Southern Brittish _lot_, but long in the case of á).  The non-umlauted á
merged with the umlauted one at a very early date (there is only one MS in
existence which distinguishes them), but the sound has since become higher,
giving [O] or [o] in the modern mainland languages, [aw] in IS and [oa] in
FO.  The short umlauted vowel mostly lost its rounding in the mainland
languages, but became front rounded in the insular ones (except before
nasals in FO, where it merged with o instead.)



/BP

  B.Philip Jonsson  mailto:melroch@mail.com
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