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Comment by joshdavham | Hacker News Reader

> preferably contain the letters Å, Ä or Ö

Yes, but why prefer these letters?

I don’t know Swedish. Is it because these diacritics make the names seem more exotic?

Those are the letters we have that are distinct from English. Not exotic to us, but yeah, "weird letters" is probably considered part of the international brand now.

By the way, we consider them unique letters, not A and O with diacritics. The Swedish alphabet goes …XYZÅÄÖ.

Oh, and I just learned that we only officially added W in 2006. Before that, it was considered a variant of V. We still pronounce them the same, which is why many swedes will mix them up when speaking English. Mostly in the W->V direction, but I've heard the opposite happen too.

I lived in Sweden in the late nineties. The local phone book had my Dutch name sorted under the V & W section because it has the word 'van' (means of in English) in it. In the Netherlands my name would be in the G section (van Gurp) because otherwise most of the phone book would have to be sorted under the V, which would defeat the purpose of sorting.

> The Swedish alphabet goes …XYZÅÄÖ.

IKEA sold that too: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/306072403869

Huh, interesting that they are collated at the end. These differences also makes sorting language dependent.

In Hungarian it's A, Á, B, C, Cs, D, Dz, Dzs, E, É, F... So Cu--- comes before Cs---

Just to make things worse, the Scandinavian languages use different versions of what have historically been the same letters, and collate them differently. E.g. Norwegian has æ (Ä), ø (Ö), å, collated in that order. Technically the Swedish variants are not part of the Norwegian alphabet, but they're typically collated with their modern Norwegian equivalents.

At least in Norwegian, ae, oe, and aa is also traditionally collated as if they were using these letters, so a word starting "aa" comes at the end of the alphabet, after z, oe and ae....

At least Danish and Norwegian share the order; the order is ÆØÅ in Danish as well :-)

But they are on different keys on keyboards, annoyingly, leading to one "ÖÆØ" key and one "ÄØÆ" key on Scandinavian keyboards (not to mention the horrible "½§§§½|" key!).

Yeah, "nordic" keyboards are a pain. I always get a Danish, or extra keycaps :-)

Which has resulted in this catastrophe:

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71OSnDl45vL.jpg

Even worse, in Czech it’s

A B C Č D Ď E F G H Ch I J…

• „če“ goes after both „ca“ and „ci“, but „ác“ goes between „ab“ and „ad“

• „cha“ goes after „da“ and „ha“

I guess it helps with emphasizing their Swedish identity, which is one of their goals with naming. Doesn't gel too well with "feels good to say" for a non-native speaker, but I see their point.

Yeah, given they sell to every continent, I find it utterly impossible they truly tested this with each of the dozens to hundreds of languages their customers speak.

Not sure why, but when I see certain diacritics with latin alphabet, my brain tries to place the language somewhere in Europe. I don't know if I can call that an exotic feeling but it certainly feels foreign.

Häagen-Dazs is American, but was apparently meant to sound Danish. To a Scandinavian it absolutely doesn't.

Scandinavia and the Nordics are quite fancy and refined for Americans. Lagom, hygge, fika, the minimalism, the enlightened equality and solidarity, good education, little crime, highest happiness ratings, even prisons are like hotels, etc makes it a kind of imagined lifestyle that's cozy and thoughtful and so on.

That's how they getcha, and then go full midsommar...

Could also be Vietnamese, they are big on diacritics.

Vietnamese can easily be recognized because most words are one syllable and the vowel may even have two diacritics stacked on top.

Thanks to French, who came up with the current writing system.

A Portuguese Jesuit, actually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_Pina

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_branding (especially the Foreign Orthography section)

röck döts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_umlaut

A møøse once bit my sister...

I raise you an em-dash —̈ with an umlaut!

Suck on that, AI Slop Detector!

(Confession and question for dang: I actually used an LLM to generate that unicode composite to copy and paste —̈ is that against HN guidelines?)

Most likely. In the early 90s there was a knock-off of Ikea called Stør which used the ø for exoticism. I had assumed that it was a Danish company, but apparently, not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STØR (The store where I bought some of my first furniture from—off the 60 in City of Industry—was quite possibly the original location).

> knock-off of ikea

We have one called jysk... They're doing alright.

Stør was really blatant to the extent that they were successfully sued by IKEA for their duplication. They were eventually bought out by IKEA, probably for the real estate.

> I don’t know Swedish. Is it because these diacritics make the names seem more exotic?

of course. Haagen Dazs, Motorhead, etc have known it loooong ago

Pöyzen Böyzen

Yës

You mean öf cårse?

Nordic nod of approval

Håhåhåhå

Why not rename to IKEÅ ?

Because it would then be pronounced IKE-Oh.

Also, the A is short for Agunnaryd, the founder's hometown. (IK is his initials, Ingvar Kamprad, and E is for Elmtaryd, his family farm.)

The A can still stand for Agunnaryd and the circle at the top can be the midnight sun, which embodies the sprit of Sweden

To reiterate on another comment that would make no sense to Swedish speakers. Å is a distinct letter, with a different and unique vowel sound. It is in no way "a slightly different kind of A".

Your suggestion sounds a bit like spelling Apple like AIILE and using the circles to form a cool infinity symbol. Or something.

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