umlaut

[Peter A. McGraw]

The Danish ligature formed of a+e represents a VERY low VERY front monophthong. A Danish exchange student who lived with us when I was in high
school would spell Danish words by pronouncing such vowels as this one and ø, not by naming their individual graphic elements.

Peter Mc.

--On Thursday, May 3, 2001 6:49 AM -0700 "A. Maberry" <maberry at U.WASHINGTON.EDU> wrote:

> On Thu, 3 May 2001, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:
>>
>> Is "æ" in Danish simply an equivalent of "ae" (as it is in modern
>> English, I think) or is it a "vowel in its own right"? Theoretically,
>> one could take the Danish vowel as an alternative way of writing "ae",
>> or one could assert that there is an uncommon vowel "æ" in English ....
>
> I can't be entirely sure about Danish, but I suspect it is like Norwegian
> where the "ae" ligature is a separate letter not the equivalent of a+e.
> Letters beginning with that ligature are listed in dictionaries after Z,
> not after a-d, and Consonant-ae (ligature) follow *Consonant-z.
>
> I think that makes sense as to how the letter is considered. Also I
> remeber something from I talk I attended on Unicode in which it as stated
> that Germans and most other language communities considered a letter plus
> an "umlaut" to be letter+diacritic, whereas the Scandinavian language
> communities considered them as separate letters; i.e. the o-with-umlaut,
> o-with-slash, etc., are letters themselves.
>
> allen
> maberry at u.washington.edu



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                               Peter A. McGraw
                   Linfield College   *   McMinnville, OR
                            pmcgraw at linfield.edu