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It's not exactly right to say that a/å/ä and o/ö have absolutely no relation in Swedish. There are plenty of language cases where they act more like umlauts, su

It's not exactly right to say that a/å/ä and o/ö have absolutely no relation in Swedish. There are plenty of language cases where they act more like umlauts, such as stor/större (large/larger) or få/färre (few/fewer). Despite this, they are still always treated as separate letters. Also, the history of the letter shapes are the same as the german umlauts, with e being written above a or o before writing ä or ö and o written above a before writing å.

Sharlin 4y ago
To be fair, vowel gradation (aka ablaut) is a rather weak relationship – one wouldn’t usually say, eg. that in English i, a, and u are related just because of the conjugation of Germanic strong verbs such as sing/sang/sung.
- arnsholt 4y ago
  Ablaut is unrelated in this context though. These vowels arise from a much more recent sound change (conveniently called umlaut, because it gave rise to a bunch of umlauted vowels).
  - Sharlin 4y ago
    Fair point, it's about back vowels becoming front vowels of the same height.
lokedhs 4y ago
In one sense you're right. There is a historical relation. However, I'd argue that that relation is so obscure these days that no native speaker would even think about it, unless it's pointed out of course. But yes, the origin of the letters is indeed from their base, where ä came from an e written on top of the a. This is more clear in Norwegian where you write the same letter like this æ. These days, very few people (outside of liguists working with the history of the language) would argue that ä is a variant of a though.