How the Å came to be | Hacker News Reader

How the Å came to be

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144 pointspyxl75 comments

Not to take away from Scandinavian orthographic history, but I still can't forgive the thrifty Caxton for using a "y" to supplant thorn [þ] and eth [ð]in orthography. I don't care about the aesh, or the transformation of wynn or yogh, but I wish we didn't have to write a digraph for both the "th" sounds.

Usage of <y> (and <th> for that matter) in place of <þ> predates Caxton's press. An example of a scribe substituting <y> for <þ> in manuscript can be seen at [1], a legal document in an English chancery hand from c. 1445. The use of <th> was already very common in the Middle English period, with <þ> (or later <y>) retaining use only in sigla (common scribal abbreviations). See [2], a page of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales from the Ellesmere manuscript (c. 1410) for example.

In fact, many (most?) of the works printed by Caxton himself actually do feature a distinct <þ> glyph, though it is limited in use to sigla (it never appears without a superscript <e> for <þe>, <t> for <þat>, …). His first printed English work [3], printed c. 1473 while he was still stationed at Bruges in what is now Belgium, has a distinct <þ>; his later works printed at his own press in London do also, such as [4] (which is printed c. 1480 in the typeface characteristic of his press).

For some related discussion, see [5].

That said, I share your dismay that we no longer have a <þ> (or, honestly, an <ð> or a <ȝ>, though [ð] and [θ] are allophones and the <gh> once represented by <ȝ> is now often silent). I just wouldn't be so quick to blame Caxton.

———

[1]: http://medievalwriting.50megs.com/scripts/examples/chancery6...

[2]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Ellesmer...

[3]: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/displayPhoto.pl?path=/service/...

[4]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Brut_Chr...

[5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15678583

Hey awesome information, thanks. I was a while ago I had read about that theory in some book about old English.

Looks like the custom existed before Caxton but the printing press exacerbated it and pretty much put an end to the vacillation.

If only Apple and Google engineers would understand that it's almost impossible to mistype A and Å on a qwerty-keyboard, it would be awesome.

Are you referring to mobile-phone autocorrect issues?

so often an obscure word is substituted for a common one (I'm talking about swype on android), the one that springs to mind is thou for you.

I absolutely agree. I don't know enough about Unicode, but is the Å and Ä very close to the A in the bit pattern or something and the hasty implementation led to this nonsensical autocorrect?

Because, if you've ever looked at a keyboard with a Nordic layout, A and Å couldn't be further apart. It's like thinking you mistakenly typed L instead of A on an American keyboard.

I'm guessing it is because some people (like me) who don't use the nordic layout on their phones (I'm pretty sure the original iPhone at least didn't come with different keyboard layouts) just use 'a' and 'o' instead of 'å/ä' and 'ö' and expect the auto-correct to sort it out. Speaking only for myself I find this feature extremely helpful.

On a similar note: my iPhone very often autocorrects wurde to würde and hatte to hätte when typing German. These are all extremely common words (and part of the built-in dictionary). The one it "corrects" into are even less common. As the keys are on opposite ends of the keyboard you can't mistype that. Very annoying.

If someone knows how to disable that without switching off autocorrect altogether, I would be very glad to know.

you got dedicated äöü keys on your keyboard?

i just long-press the letters if i really need an Umlaut, but generally i just type the normal one and use the suggestions to switch to the correct spelling.

Autocorrection is dependent on your keyboard btw. It might be a good idea to try a different ones. I haven't really had that issue since i've switched to GBoard, but i remember struggling with the same problem before as well.

> you got dedicated äöü keys on your keyboard?

Yes, the German QWERTZ layout has 3 dedicated keys for äöü. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/36/KB... (just left of the Enter key).

However, the virtual keyboard I'm currently writing ^W swiping this on does not have dedicated keys for them. I have to long-press [a] to get a popup with variants, including [ä].

The dedicated äöü keys were added in some update a few years ago (there is no ß key). At that time you could only get German autocorrect with that keyboard (I think) so I got used to it. At some later point they added autocorrect for all other installed languages to that keyboard so I now use it exclusively (due to the extra keys they differ in width between keyboards which is confusing when switching).

I wonder why that happens, since they use models that take into account the keyboard layout. Maybe they assume you don't have a Nordic layout and "helpfully" correct it for you?

On the other hand, I've probably used A instead of Å at least 500 times in the last couple of days alone. It seems like a fair assumption if the word fits when changing.

The thing that I miss the most on iOS (don't know if this is the case with Android as well) is for the OS and apps to just remember which language I last used when communicating with a given person. Just because I recently wrote a message to my Danish girlfriend doesn't mean I want the Danish keyboard instead of the English one when I go to write a message to my Canadian friend. Seriously, is nobody at Apple bilingual? How they've managed to release 11 versions of iOS and never implemented something as simple and useful as this is beyond me...

I've been frustrated about this for years as well. Writing in three different languages daily, but always the same language to the same persons.

I know that it is not what you are asking for, but I believe Facebook messenger indeed does this. So it is certainly not a technical limitation but purely a lacking implementation.

Honestly I'd probably be fine with a combined Swedish & English keyboard for most of my daily interactions (also Swede's in general and in the tech sector in particular mix in a lot of english).

However being half dane close to the german border and with a interest in language I do occasionally use other languages as well which results in me having 6 more active keyboards, and while I mostly toggle between Swedish, English and some occasional emoji it's quite a hassle to shift though half a dozen keyboards every other time.

Interested to hear what solution would be better for you. I live in Sweden and while I don’t speak Swedish everyone I work with basically does as you describe, the keyboard toggle between English/Swedish keyboards.

Frankly because I work with Danes and Swedes all the time it’s usually enough to hold down A and O when I need to type å, ö, ø, etc. but I usually don’t type in those languages. It’s mostly for locations and the occasional translation.

Why not do like I do with English, Swedish and Portuguese: use the English keyboard and long press the letters you need to type that have a diacritic, like: é, à, á, ê, õ, ... in Portuguese or å, ö, ä in Swedish?

This saves me the hassle of switching keyboards all the time, I just learned what long presses I need to use in the US International keyboard and can type even in German :)

I don’t understand: iOS messages does this for me, and has for a while.

I have all my keyboards set to querty though, so a language change is solely a spelling-correction change, not a layout change.

I agree. A really annoying "feature". I can understand it if you use the English qwerty-layout but not when you use the Swedish/Norwegian/Danish/German layout.

There is an open issue for this over at the android issue tracker. https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/37104657

Another annoying "feature" is that the rest of the keyboard also changes by physically moving the keys, causing me to regularly mistype certain letters when changing keyboard as you can't trust muscle memory. I'd rather like to just have dead dummy keys on those slots or something so I don't have to mess up texts by muscle all the time.

This is my struggle living in Sweden as an American. I go to type on my coworkers keyboard and the result is a mixuture of frustration and hilarity as my muscle memory produces bad results. Some things make absolutely no sense like switching - and _ on Swedish keyboards. Other random frustration is the lack of tilde on Swedish keyboards. How can you work on Unix based systems without easy access to tilde?!

Interestingly all the Swedes I work with have their own solutions to the tilde problem. Some type the alt code while others use alternative keyboard configurations.

Tilde is available with alt-carret/umlaut, that's no harder then other specials such as @[]{}() etc.

But I understand the frustration, I feel the same every time you boot up a new system or VM and it defaults to american layout, changing the keyboard layout from a unix prompt when you can't find i.e. - / : = is surprisingly hard.

I used to use svorak a5 about 10 years ago but eventually switched back to swedish qwerty since it was causing such confusion with coworkers.

I also switch to a right-handed mouse about 4-5 years ago for the same reason with the addition that ergonomic left handed mice are pretty much non-existent, it's mainly just standard two button mice which you flip the mouse buttons on.

Interesting article. Undoubtedly, some of the earliest uses of the letter were lost in Tre Kronor, where Sweden kept its national archives until the castle burned down in the late 17th century.

> Norwegian and Danish aa was finally officially replaced by the Swedish å — in 1917 and 1948, respectively.

I guess that explains why both Norwegian and Danish has "å" as the last letter in the alphabet, whereas in Swedish "å" is the third from the last letter (name sorting beware!).

Consequently the expression "the Alpha and the Omega" (from the beginning to the end) is "från A till Ö" in Swedish and "från A till Å" in Norwegian and Danish(?).

I can see from your posting history that you are Swedish, so know this better than I, but I went to https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfa_och_Omega and from what I can make out Sweden uses "A och O", not "från A till Ö".

FWIW, https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfa_og_omega says it's "A og Å" for Norwegian while https://nn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfa_og_omega uses "frå A til Å" for Nynorsk. I assume this is like how in English we can write both (say) "The A to Z of Photography" and "Photography from A to Z".

Perhaps Swedish uses both "A och O" and "från A till Ö"? A DuckDuckGo search for both phrases supports that conjecture, in that both return plenty of Swedish pages.

Correct, in Swedish you have both, though they differ a bit how you would use them. I think your English example covers it good.

First we have "från A till Ö", or the older form "från A till O", meaning the same as in the other languages, like all of it, from beginning to end, like a register or a list.

The other one, "A och O" is used as you wrote, the example form the Wikipedia article is good, "Balans är A och O, när man går på lina" roughly "Balance is key when tightrope walking".

I never heard anyone saying "A och Ö". For me it sounds really silly saying "Balans är A och Ö, när man går på lina", but apparently some do

https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22a%20och%20%C3...

However you rarely hear anyone using the older form "från A till O" today.

Norwegian, oh in my first post I spelled it wrong, it should be "fra A til Å" in bokmål. Sorry for that.

https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=fra%20a%20til%20...

Spelling is a bit confusing when dealing with svenska, nynorsk, bokmål & danska at the same time.

Danish and Norweigan seems to use "A og O"

https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22a%20og%20o%22

and "A og Å"

https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22a%20og%20%C3%...

Edit: sorry for using Google links instead of DuckDuckGo. Got problems with DDG when searching for "A og Å", got too many false hits, in Norwegian (and Danish?) you can write "å" instead of "og" for "and". In Swedish you would write "o" instead of "och".

Edit 2:

Some search results from runeberg.org (Similar as Google Books)

"från A till Ö" https://www.google.se/search?q=%22fr%C3%A5n+a+till+%C3%B6%22...

"från A till O" https://www.google.se/search?q=%22fr%C3%A5n+a+till+o%22+%2Bs...

"A och O" https://www.google.se/search?q=%22a+och+o%22+%2Bsite:runeber...

"A och Ö" only false hits https://www.google.se/search?q=%22a+och+%C3%B6%22+%2Bsite:ru...

Edit 3: Maybe "Balance is everything when tightrope walking" is a better translation.

Thanks for the clarification!

I think I have a joke.

If "å" means "a river, a creek, a big stream" (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%A5#Noun_4 ) and "ö" means "island" (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%B6#Noun ) then "Från Å Till Ö" might be a story about someone who paddles a canoe down a river to camp on one of the river islands.

Or rather, only the last 3/29ths of the story.

You should read Swedish poet Gustaf Fröding!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustaf_Fr%C3%B6ding

He is considered by some of the greatest poets of all time in Sweden. He experimented a lot with his language in the poems he wrote, often with dialects and local expressions.

"Coincidentally" he came from a province called Värmland. Värmland neighbors with Norway to the west. Dialect of Värmland (värmländska) has a close relationship with Norwegian.

Swedes find that people from Värmland speaks with happy upbeat at the end of the sentence (intonation), just like how Swedes hear Norwegians.

Many of the greatest writers & poets in Sweden originate from Värmland.

Anyway, Fröding has a poem called "Dumt fôlk" (Dumb people)

https://sv.wikisource.org/wiki/Dumt_f%C3%B4lk

He is walking about a Sunday morning and meets an other man that asks for directions to the vicarage, and one part of the direction uses funny dialect twist, the man will arrive to a stream where "Å i åa ä e ö" - and in the stream there is an island. The man doesn't understand a word of it and leaves.

woman reading the poem https://youtu.be/UP_mwiOY7C8

This is excellent. I've run into all these different forms of umlauts in various old Scandinavian and German manuscripts. I concluded that, yes, they are indeed just umlauts, so if transcribing in latin Script (for German anyway), use an umlaut. The grammar made that clear enough.

But I never knew the typographical history as to why there are so many different forms. So very cool that we can trace the lineage to specific printers.

Is any Slovak speaker able to comment on the excerpt from the article below? Equating the Czech "ů" and the Slovak "ô" sounds wrong to me but my experience with Slovak is very limited.

" As for the letter ů, as used in the Czech Republic, the story is a similar one to the Swedish. In the sixteenth century, the pronunciation of /uo/ changed to /uː/, prompting a need to reflect this in written Czech. Reformationists with close ties to Germany brought the Early New High German ů with them and used it in the influential translation of the Czech Bible kralická. (The closely related Slovakian language writes the same sound with an ô after Martin Hattala’s 1852 grammar.) "

ů and ú are pronounced the same in czech /u:/ - the only difference is grammar. There are very obscure rules as when to to write ů or ú (wheter it's in the middle of the word, end of the word, exclamations etc...)

Slovak language also has ú and to my ears it's pronounced the same as in czech. ô is pronounced /uo/. It might be that the pronunciation has changed in czech language during hundreds of years. Same is the case of ä in slovak that used to have different pronunciation to a regular e but after many years (people being lazy) it is just being pronounced as a regular e.

So if we talk about pronunciation used these days then ů and ô are not pronounced the same at all.

I'm no historian/linguist. Born in slovakia studied in czech republic

Cool - so the ů/ú difference in Czech I was aware of (or at least I roughly understood it to be related to its position in the word).

But I understand now - the origin is shared, but they're definitely pronounced differently nowadays.

Thanks!

Czech/Slovak speaker here. Slovak kept the original sound /uo/, which is written as ô. There are many words with a simple ô/ů substitution, for example Czech “trůn” /tru:n/ vs. Slovak “trôn” /truon/, meaning “throne”.

So no, they are not phonetically equivalent, but they are related.

As far as I know it's not trôn but trón in slovak ...

EDIT: Thinking about it, kůň and kôň (horse) might be a better example

I’d be curious to see some of the sources for the latter statements about modern adoption of å in non-northern languages.

I am familiar with the Italian ones mentioned, and afaik they don’t have official transcription rules, they have always been almost exclusively oral languages. In my experience , whenever a transcription was required (usually in an entertainment context, since they were never official languages), people would just make it up as they went along.

As such, I wouldn’t give too much weight to this or that random source using a weird northern-European letter to try and legitimise their arbitrary transcription; but if there is a convincing argument against this position, I’d love to see it.

On 6 June 1523, Gustav Vasa was elected king of Sweden. Swedes celebrate this date as “Svenska flaggans dag”

I doubt even 10% know when this occurs, or why.

As a Swede I can agree that it seems few of us know why that date was chosen. However, I'm surprised you think it's uncommon to know which day of the year it is.

It doesn't help that there are two competing stories for why the date is chosen. The other story I've heard is that it was due to the Swedish 'constitution' being signed on that date in 1808.

Instrument of Government of both 1809 and of 1974 was signed on the sixth of June.

I'm not sure if the 1809 date was picked on purpose but the 1974 date was. Sixth of June has special place in Swedish history.

Glad it isn't sixth of January.

And here I thought the Lanteans invented it. I need to rewatch this Stargate documentary.

It's always funny to see "STARGÅTE", the Norwegian space puzzle [1]. Also, for more confusing uses of umlauts/diacritics, see the Wikipedia article on "Röck Döts" [2].

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/g%C3%A5te

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_umlaut

The KIA car company logo bugs me in a similar way. I read it as Kappa Iota Lambda.

Oh, this is about the history of calligraphy, typography, alphabets and character sets surrounding the (swedish) letter (which resembles an) “A” with a ring (non)diacritic, and not about the ångström as a unit of measurement.

EDIT: People are vehement about the status of this particular character, and that doesn’t change the fact that I expected an article about a unit of measurement.

  (yes, I understand that disagreement is 
   afoot, but it has nothing to do with 
   what I originally came here for)

I think that a Swede would disagree with you that this is an A with a ˚ diacritic; Å is seen here as a seperate letter and granted its own place in the alphabet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%85#Place_in_alphabet

Any Scandinavian would disagree. Æ, Ø, and Å most definitely are letters in their own right.

The case is slightly less clear for W.

Although a Swedish person might disagree about how to write ø and æ...

Why? Those characters are not used in the Swedish language.

AFAIK they sound exactly the same like København and Köpenhamn.

That's actually not quite the same ø. The Swedish one is slightly lighter. Use the deeper Danish ø-sound in a Swedish context, and you clearly sound like a Dane speaking Swedish.

The same is true for ä and æ. The latter has a broader sound while the former sounds a bit closer to e. It is easy to spot Norwegians talking Swedish (such as myself :)

You try to talk Swedish rather than just speaking Norwegian? My experience is that Scandinavians just speak their native language and expect that other Scandinavians should understand them. Any attempts to speak the other language end up sounding like parodies rather than serious attempts.

Not sure it's different enough to warrant a new letter, but Spanish O and Scandinavian Å has the same sound so I guess it's all very muddled.

"Ä" is worse, it can be three completely different things depending on language.

In for example Swedish, it's a distinct letter of the alphabet, representing a distinct vowel.

In German, it's the letter "A" with an umlaut mark, which is not a distinct letter of the alphabet, but it is a distinct vowel.

And in French, it's the letter "A" with a diaresis mark, which neither makes it a distinct letter of the alphabet, nor a distinct vowel, it's just a mark that signifies that two adjacent vowels should not be pronounced as a diphtong.

Or you have Icelandic:

"A" is a distinct letter and distinct vowel.

"Á" is also a distinct letter and a distinct vowel, and not an "A" with an acute accent.

"À" exists in Icelandic in (very few) French loan-words and is not a distinct letter nor a distinct vowel, instead it's viewed as an "A" with a grave accent.

(And this is why lexical sorting has to be highly localized. I still think Turkish has the funniest gotcha where "I" and "i" aren't the upper/lower-case of the same letter, it's the uppercase of one letter, and the lowercase of a completely different letter.)

Specifically:

ı (capital I; the letter is pronounced as a schwa), and:

i (capital İ)

This is why upper- and lowercasing of letters is also locale-dependant (in addition to collation).

> In German, it's the letter "A" with an umlaut mark, which is not a distinct letter of the alphabet, but it is a distinct vowel.

The umlauts are distinct letters of the German alphabet. The English Wikipedia says so but still lists them as special characters which is confusing at best. The German Wikipedia just lists the umlauts as ordinary characters.

>German uses three letter-diacritic combinations (Ä/ä, Ö/ö, Ü/ü) using the umlaut and one ligature (ß (called Eszett (sz) or scharfes S, sharp s)) which are officially considered distinct letters of the alphabet.[1]

I believe there are just two cases:

- A umlaut: German, Swedish, etc.

- A with diaeresis: French, Catalan, etc.

It is important to distinguish both cases because they differ at least in collation and typography.

In a German dictionary A with diaeresis should be always treated like an A, while A umlaut should be treated according to the different collation standards that exist in German. In a German font the dots are closer to the letter than in a French font.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography#Alphabet

Confusingly, there are two different collation standards when treating German umlauts: One for lists of names and one for everything else.

When reciting the alphabet German school kids don't add the umlauts (at least I didn't – I don't think that has changed in the last decades) and if you ask someone how many letters the alphabet has they will answer "26" without hesitation while in Sweden they are treated as distinct characters of the alphabet in every sense.

> Confusingly, there are two different collation standards when treating German umlauts: One for lists of names and one for everything else.

Yes, this alone is confusing. My point is that it is even more complicated because strictly the standard only applies to umlauts but not to letters with diaeresis. Unicode offers a way to treat these two cases differently utilizing the combining grapheme joiner (CGJ).

>> The CGJ can also be used in German, for example, to distinguish in sorting between “ü” in the meaning of u-umlaut, which is the more common case and often sorted like <u,e>, and “ü” in the meaning u-diaeresis, which is comparatively rare and sorted like “u” with a secondary key weight. [1, page 850]

> When reciting the alphabet German school kids don't add the umlauts (at least I didn't – I don't think that has changed in the last decades) and if you ask someone how many letters the alphabet has they will answer "26" without hesitation while in Sweden they are treated as distinct characters of the alphabet in every sense.

You have a point here and maybe the English Wikipedia isn't so wrong in listing them as special characters. Being special doesn't make A umlaut a funky A though. It still is a letter in it's own right.

[1] Unicode Standard 10.0: http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode10.0.0/UnicodeStandar...

For what it worth, Dutch has "ij", which could be a letter, or diphthong, or two unrelated letters (in words borrowed from French, for example), and could also be written as "ij", or as "ÿ", or even "y".

There is no dedicated key on computer keyboard for it, but you are supposed to remember it's a unit when capitalizing, for example IJmuiden.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph)

Meanwhile, the Swedish alphabet has 29 letters. Since 2006. Before 2006, "W" wasn't considered a letter of the alphabet, since it was just a double "V", and only existed in German and English loan-words and names.

So before that, this would have been the correct sort order of some names: "Valter, William, Viktor", but these days they would probably be sorted like "Valter, Viktor, William"

> I believe there are just two cases:

Nope. :-)

Because in Swedish, ÅÄÖ are distinct letters of the alphabet, they are not treated different than any other vowel, they're not variants of base letters or anything like that.

I was wrong about ÄÖÜ not being part of the German alphabet. They are, but they're not letters (Buchstaben), they're umlauts. So the Swedish alphabet contains 29 letters, but the German alphabet contains 26 letter, 3 umlauts, and the Eszett.

In the end, it's all arbitrary as fuck, with tons of historical reasons for the way things are, and god help the localization engineer who thinks it's all easy peasy. :-)

>> And in French, it's the letter "A" with a diaresis mark, which neither makes it a distinct letter of the alphabet, nor a distinct vowel, it's just a mark that signifies that two adjacent vowels should not be pronounced as a diphtong.

I can't think of an example of a French word where an A takes a diairesis. Can you give one?

Wikipedia has this to say:

En français, le tréma peut se placer sur les voyelles e, i, u (et y dans des noms propres) pour indiquer, normalement, que la voyelle qui précède doit être prononcée séparément et ne fait pas partie d'un digramme.

[https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tr%C3%A9ma]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Te%C3%A4n

(Super uncommon, yes, but it exists)

This sort of interesting article is exactly what I come to Hacker News for.

It didn’t get interesting to me, until I was quickly corrected by more than one person. Is the phonetic pronunciation... what is the pronunciation for Å in English?

Aww

Similar to English "o" (more so than the Scandinavian o). It is one of the easier vowel sounds. Ø and y and u are far harder for English speakers.

As the o in 'more'

It's satire, and a little funny. They have the correct pronunciation for Norwegian at least, it's similar enough in Danish and Swedish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f488uJAQgmw

Also, extra extra unnecessary knowledge: The symbol for the Ångström unit has a different Unicode encoding than the capital "Å", in the same way that the Ohm symbol "Ω" is different from Greek capital omega. "W" for Watt doesn't have it's own codepoint in Unicode though, so that's arbitrary.

This has only been allowed into Unicode for compatibility with older encodings and is sort of an exception.

> Multiple Semantics. Because nonspacing combining marks have such a wide variety of applications, they may have multiple semantic values. For example, U+0308 = diaeresis = trema = umlaut = double derivative. Such multiple functions for a single combining mark are not separately encoded in the standard.

[..]

> Occasionally, for compatibility with other standards, a single abstract character may correspond to more than one code point—for example, “Å” corresponds both to U+00C5 Å latin capital letter a with ring above and to U+212B Å angstrom sign.

Both quotes from Unicode Standard 10.0:

http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode10.0.0/UnicodeStandar...

That's what all the "non-Swedish physicists" thought.

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