this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2024
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[–] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Why is “ø y” a no for Denmark, but a yes for Norway? I’m pretty sure both countries have the same alphabet?

[–] 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 16 points 3 months ago (1 children)

it's not "ø", "y", it's "øy" in combination (as a digraph?)

same as "th" further down not implying the N languages don't have "t" or "h", just that they don't have "th"

[–] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 4 points 3 months ago

Aha thanks for the explanation.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The "øy" is written without a space between the letters, which seems to mean that these letters occur together in words (more obvious example: "eau" leads into French).

[–] wowbagger@lemm.ee 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The problem is that we can put words together to form new words. So say I produced a yogurt at a lake(sø) , I could call it søyougurt. It's not a word that would be in a dictionary though, but lots of that kind of words aren't.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 months ago

Maybe within one syllable then?

I mean, I'm not looking to defend this diagram, I have no idea if it's correct. And frankly I would be surprised if it is anything more than an approximation, since language is always messy.