Re: Question: Old Norse o-ogonek, and accented Danish characters

Daniel Wier wrote:

>I just got through studying a couple of pages by Michael Everson (the
>ones concerning the old thorn and yogh letters).  And I discovered in
>Old Norse (and pre-modern Icelandic) not only the complex vowels  (ae
>ligature),   (o-slash), and  (a-ring), but an 'o' with an ogonek
>(reversed cedilla), which in Polish (and Old Lithuanian) to mark nasal
>vowels.
>
>So what exactly is the value of Old Norse/Icelandic O-ogonek?
I don't know how Old Norse/Icelandic uses the ogenek, but in Dania
(the Danish phonetic alphabet), it is used to mark nasality. Some
Danish dialects had nasal vowels and the ogenek was used by Danish
linguists to phonetically transcribe the nasal vowels of these
dialects.

>Also, Unicode has within the Latin Extended B block (some very exotic
>Latin modifications are used; they can be found in the Lucida Sans
>Unicode every Windows 95/NT 4.0/98/2000 user should have.  But the
>newest form of Times New Roman, Arial, Courier, and definitely other
>popular fonts have the three aforementioned modern Danish vowels,
>(is that the correct order?),
Yes, that's the correct order.

>with acute accents.  Is that used to mark
>a high tone or a stress accent?
Danish does not have tone, but a related phenomenon and apparently
unique to Danish. Its called the 'stød', where some words have a
glottal constriction superimposed on words. E.g. <engelsktalende>
['EN?l=sgta?l=n@] 'English speaking'. This stød is phonemic in some
words; <hun> [hun] 'she' vs. <hund> [hun?] 'dog'. Or what about
<hunhund> ['hunhun?] 'female dog'.

Incidentally, Dania uses the apostrophe to mark stød.

>Or does the acute accent mark a long
>vowel, like Czech and Hungarian?
There are long vowels in Danish, but this is not explicitly marked
in the orthography.

Basically, Danish orthography does not use acute accents. However,
it is occasionally used on <e> to distinguish the indefinite
articles 'en/et' from the numeral 'én/ét'. The numeral has stress
while the articles don't. Furthermore, the 'én' has the stød while
'en' doesn't -- that is, ['en?] vs. [en] respectively.

-kristian- 8)