5 ms·

If what it depends on is the language then thats trivial.

• dijit 1y ago
  Why is it trivial? The ä and a sounds in Swedish and Finnish are swapped; and they're direct neighbours (with compulsory education for Swedish in Finland, no less).
  • forinti 1y ago
    But within each language it is well defined. Between languages, even the letters have different uses. Diacritics can be used to signal a different sound or the tonicity of the word (at least in the languages I know those are the two uses). I don't understand what this thread is all about. English doesn't need accents because there's no universal meaning attached to each one? That doesn't make sense.
  • em-bee 1y ago
    not just neighbors by country. a not insignificant proportion of finns speak swedish natively
  • lrasinen 1y ago
    Do you have any examples? As a Finnish speaker the Swedish "a" sounds the same. "Pappa", "framtiden" etc. It's "ä" and "e" which have swapped uses, but it's not exactly consistent (e.g. "Järnvägstorget" where first ä is close to the Finnish ä, second ä is closer to e but so is the e at the end)
    • dijit 1y ago
      Ä in Swedish is an æ sound. Ä in Finnish is a pitched A sound, like the A in “cat”. The pitched “a” in Swedish is the default one.
      • lrasinen 1y ago
        Wikipedia lists both "cat" and the Finnish "mäki" under æ: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-open_front_unrounded_vowel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-open_front_unrounded_vo... Do you have some example words that would show the difference?
        • dijit 1y ago
          Well, mostly hearing people say the words will be telling. Gävle in Sweden: https://forvo.com/word/g%C3%A4vle/ https://forvo.com/word/g%C3%A4vle/ Linnanmäki in Finland: https://forvo.com/word/linnanm%C3%A4ki/ https://forvo.com/word/linnanm%C3%A4ki/ In the Finnish example you can hear both the soft “en” (linnan) and the higher pitched “” (maki) which is triggered with umlauts; Where the Swedish A is softened by umlauts in the Gävle example.
        • 3836293648 1y ago
          That's an american cat then, because that sounds crazy to my ears
      • dijit 1y ago
        (how did I get downvoted for this when I literally lived in both countries)