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I have a "Särna" chair. "Sarna" in Spanish is "Scabies".

Fun fact: Although "Sarna" comes from Latin, seems like it's only used in Romance languages present in the Iberian Peninsula (Galician, Catalan, Portuguese, Spanish...) and not for example in Italian, Romanian or French, as it's an Iberian loan word. Most other languages derive from another different Latin word, "scabiēs".

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The umlaut does mean that to a Swede it is not the same word sound at all. I can only guess that is why it was allowed?

The sound is still very close in this situation (ä before r) my guess is they didn't have the Spanish sarna on their radar

To me, a dane, that would be like saying "sarna" and "særna" is the same. They're not.

> The sound is still very close

What do you base this on? Do you speak Swedish? Did you look up the phonetics?

They are no more similar than A and E in English.

The source of the word is almost certainly the Swedish town Särna in this case. Note that ä is not an a, in sound it's more similar to e than a, although it is distinct from both.

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