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It occurs to me that this is analogous to accented letters in languages that use the “same” alphabet. For instance, in Spanish, “ñ” is a distinct letter; in Eng
by evincarofautumn 9y ago
It occurs to me that this is analogous to accented letters in languages that use the “same” alphabet. For instance, in Spanish, “ñ” is a distinct letter; in English, it’s an accented version of “n”. The same applies to Swedish å/a, Polish ó/o, &c. That is, an accented letter is a “shade” in some languages and a distinct “colour” in others.
- hibbelig 9y agoAnd the Germans don't know if ä is a separate letter or not :-)
- pluma 9y agoIIRC a further complication in German is that the dots in ä/ö/ü started out as a small "e" on top of the letter, whereas the dots in most other Latin-based languages (e.g. in English ë) are mere accents. This is why the "expanded" versions of umlauts are still ae/oe/ue. The alphabet I learned as a German child in the 1990s certainly didn't include the umlauts or eszett, nor did it acknowledge them as distinct letters. The alphabet had 26 letters, the umlauts were counted separately and the eszett was always the odd one out (often considered simply a special orthographic variant of the double-s). So to that extent, the umlauts and eszett are definitely less "letter-like" than the Nordic å or ø which are proudly included in those countries' alphabets.
- krige 9y agoin Polish you have both ó and u, which are pronounced exactly the same, but words using them are inflected differently