You can keep all the rest. I just want Þ (thorn). It represents þe “th” sound in English. Gimmie!!!
Well, it represents at least one of the th sounds for English at least. Bring back eth too! (Ð/ð)
You can’t do too much and expect to be successful. Let’s just start with þ to get everyone used to it. Remember, things like Þis can take 100 years or more to be permanent.
Ðey’re boþ great letters
Where’s the Lemmy user who unironically uses the thorn in all of their posts? You should hook up with that person!
Þ is þe coolest
For some reason I only read it as a lisp. Or a waaay over pronounced TH, like cartoonish, think daffy duck.
Yæs plæse
I know who you’re referring to, but I haven’t seen them in a while.
The supposed justification was that it fucked up AI scraping, which I think was bullshit. Seemed like more of a hipster thing.
Saw them just the other day and asked them wtf was a worb.
Edit, here it is:
It’s the sequel to Morbius - Worbius.
I got annoyed at that, so I just set up a replace on every web page that I open to change the thorn to a th. Haven’t even thought about it until seeing your post.
The þ þing? That’s really cool to have around.
I for one would love to see English gain a bit of Frenchoise nose-up with ç.
James Maynard Keenan made this
Å be like: “am i a joke to you?”
Å, så this is how we’re tålking now?
Removed by mod
in my head it’s Foghorn Leghorn
Å is what you say when you see an adorable animal
We do technically use Ø for empty sets or as diameter in mathematics, and diacriticals are technically allowed in English but we really only use them to describe phonetics.
I could have sworn it had use in either spherical or polar coordinate systems but I guess I was misremembering.
You might be thinking of Theta: θ
Nah I think it was Phi throwing me off if anything.
I can þink of anoðer couple candidates.
Such good letters. I could never digest the fact that th can sound so different (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ
There’s also thiſ.
The ‘long s’.
An f without the crossbar, ſ , sometimes more fully shaped at the bottom, like the integral symbol.
As best I can tell… linguists have not actually been able to figure out totally consistent rules for its usage, beyond ‘it replaces s, sometimes’.
It seems to pretty much be purely stylistic flair, everyone who did use it seems to have slightly different rules for how and in what circumstances they did. It tends to follow certain broader rules, but counterexamples can be found for most of them.
… I wonder if we could merge old/middle english characters and l33t sp33k.
ð4t aſſ B b0unc1n, æ’r3 d4y, æ’r3 9t
I learned about ſ from House of Leaves.
“ſtaires! We haue found ſtaires!”
i need to finish that one
It’s fun. I like ergodic literature.
The Constitution of the USA
The actual literal written document makes considerable use of ’ ſ ', this is from a rare typed version that does as well.
me on my way to eftablifh Juftice and fecure the Bleffings of Liberty to ourfelves
Aw, you have the sniffles?
God bleff you.
lolololol
Check those beautiful ligatures from long s to long s and from long s to t, and c to t.
no way. i knew it used the long S in the handwritten one, but i never knew there were typed versions. this is a find
Indeed it was, fetched a pretty penny via Sotheby’s auction.
Hilariously… was discovered during an estate sale (garage sale for rich people) in North Carolina.
Estate sales aren’t garage sales for rich people. They’re garage sales for dead people. Hence the word estate. It’s the estate of the deceased holding the sale, not the deceased. Legal bullshit mumbo gumbo, but there you have it
True, my mistake, I accidentally made a false e-statement.
Just wait until you hear about end-of-word sigma, ς.
Or the insular r, ꞃ.
I don’t like either of these because they aren’t unique enough to easily speed read. The þ is a p and b and confuses my brain and the ð is just a little too small for the cross at the top on many fonts. At least ø and æ are unique enough to my eyes.
I kan’t imagine living with that mecc.
Yeah, good point.
Ŧo Đ/đ, Ŧ/ŧ are also cool, more historically accurate(thorn and eth were never as clean cut as we like to ŧink) and fit the vibe of đe english alphabet better.
Edit: actually used đ and ŧ to show them in use.
There are too many letters already, there’s nothing c can do that k or s can’t.
Sheese? Kheese?
Hard milk
Tsheese
Tsiis
That’s how it’s spelled in Frisian
I’m in favor of replacing ch with just c, so you’d have a kappakuolo and ceese sandwic. That way, it isn’t redundant and we have fewer special cases.
Also, “x” is usually redundant with “ks”, so use it for what’s currently “sh” to eliminate another redundancy and another special case.
Add back the thorn and eth for “th” and use “f” instead of “ph” and consonants are actually pretty consistent.
Edit: I can’t believe I forgot ditching the soft “g” and “s”, so it’d actually be ceeze.
But what if i want a keese sandwick? Or are we keeping the k and just ditcing ch?
Well, yeah, you need the “k” for the sounds it currently has. How else will you have kites or air konditioning?
kondixoning?
Good point.
Q is also entirely useless.
That Q is actively detrimental
I would say there are not enough letters. We have about 12-14 vowel monopthongs, but only 6 letters to represent vowels. No wonder everything’s a fucking mess! And that’s without even getting to diphthongs.
I don’t like that O thing because I write 0’s with the line through it
As a Norwegian, I find it annoying that they “stole” Ø for that purpose. I put a backslash through my zeros instead, so it looks different. I usually pick a coding font with dotted zeros for the same reason.
As a former math major, it annoys me because 0 and Ø are different concepts.
Your comment led me down a bit of a rabbit hole and I found this on Wikipedia:
When writing in languages such as Danish and Norwegian, where the empty set character may be confused with the alphabetic letter Ø (as when using the symbol in linguistics), the Unicode character U+29B0 ⦰ REVERSED EMPTY SET may be used instead.
It also mentions what you are alluding to:
In the past, “0” (the numeral zero) was occasionally used as a symbol for the empty set, but this is now considered to be an improper use of notation.
And, as a programmer, don’t get me started on nulls…or undefined…or truthyness.
Wait, what.
… oh no. Nope.
Nope, not going back to set theory, it is 105F / ~40C right now, highly confident I would give myself heat stroke.
æ cæn totally be used in English for the “short” a. Thæt’s the sound it’s used to write in Danish and Norwegian, ænd in the Internætional Phoenetic Ælphabet, which is used by linguists to precisely trænscribe speech.
I’m not sure about ø, though. It’s often used to write a sound thæt’s like the “e” in bet, but with your lips rounded like you’re pronouncing “oo” in boot. We don’t hæve thæt sound in English, unfortunately.
Isn’t ø just the Danish/Norwegian equivalent of the German ö?
In any case, it could be used to disambiguate words with different o sounds; i.e., “polish” (to shine a surface by rubbing) from “Pølish” (from Pøland).
Because Size Matters!
Yæh
We can’t even get people to spell correctly with the letters we have.
Capitalization, and punctuation are being lost because it’s slightly inconvenient on a phone keyboard to include them. Anything outside of lowercase a-z is too hard now. Good luck getting anyone to shift the keyboard to find other characters.
Fundamentally disagree. Look at how often people use emoji, AlTerNaTiNg CaSe, and other tricks to convey meaning online (and mainly from their phones). English is not losing complexity, it’s not being dumbed down, or becoming simpler because people are typing on a touch screen. It’s evolving in real time because the methods of communication are evolving. 300 years ago we capitalized nouns in English for emphasis on important nouns, some people capitalized all nouns like in German, we used punctuation quite differently. Before that, we used these big, chunky symbols to indent our lines and make them more readable (and then we got rid of the symbols, but kept the indents, and that’s why we indent the first line of a paragraph). We used to use 3 little stars (an asterism) to break paragraphs apart. Emoji, alternating case, ellipses made of commas, weird punctuation uses, capitalization forgone to convey a flat tone, periods missed at the end of a sentence to give it a friendlier tone, all of these things are living, real grammar rules. They’re just not the same ones as in the text books. Much like how AAVE is not taught in schools as correct or proper English, but it has its own grammar rules that are consistent among its users, the way people type now is fairly consistent, and follows a series of rules that have been agreed upon in the same way that any language agrees upon its rules.
English got frozen in time because of the printing press, and we all just assumed it had been the way it was for so long that that’s the way it was, English was set. But languages are constantly evolving, and there’s really no such thing as a correct way to write a living language. There is only the way we currently write it, which is constantly changing. Normally that change is fairly slow, but we with virtually every other aspect of humanity, the computer, the Internet, the smartphone, and other rapid technological changes increases the speed at which we adopt new cultural norms exponentially.
It’s also worth noting that we write more now that we ever have before. In the past, you may occasionally write letters, jot something down on a postcard or a birthday card, have a weekly shopping list, or a note from a phone call, but apart from secretaries taking short hand, stenographers, and other specialized careers involving writing specifically, the average person did not write anywhere near as much as the average millennial or Gen z, who may communicate exclusively through text, email, discord, whatever, with their friends on a daily basis. With more writing, it follows that the language will evolve faster. A short lived species will often demonstrate more mutation and variation than a longer lived species. There are just more generations to work with. Every email, every Facebook post, every text message is a potential for a random mutation in the language, and without the strict confines of previous generations telling us that something must be written in a certain way, because the primary purpose of writing in the past was much more professional and academic, much less casual, those mutations are given a chance to survive and to flourish.
Yeah, sometimes it is genuinely hard for me to read posts made by younger Gen z or Gen alpha, and it is especially hard to read posts that are trying to mimic the gen z/alpha posts but from older generations, but I am legitimately excited to see how English evolves without the confines or academic interference. I can almost imagine a high/low English split coming, and that’s exciting.
I like your way better
Oh wait, i thought elipses made of commas were a missclick lmao
Iirc, it began that way, but it’s used now as like a softened ellipses.
I’m almost certain that earlier versions of iOS exposed the comma on the main keyboard and hid the period under the symbols button, because double-tapping space added it.
Which meant that, depending on version, you’d sometimes need to tap 6 times to write “…” (to enter the symbols keyboard mode after every period, since it would go back to the primary set every time), and only 3 to write “,,,”.
But I might be wrong.
I try, it’s just sometimes I get excited
wasn’t þere someone on fedi seriously and persistently trying to bring back þe þorn character? I just remember þey were always heavily down voted. Haven’t seen þem in a while
ive seen þat several places. Apparently the german printing press didnt add it so it fell out of use.
I think it would confuse people tbh because there’s þ and ð.
ðis is soft, like breaðe
þat isnt, like þink
th replaced boð
I like what you were going for, but I’m pretty sure “that” is “ðat”, and “þat” would be like “thot”, but with an “a”. I think.
The difference between them is ð is voiced, as in your throat is making sound and vibrating, whereas þ is voiceless, meaning it’s just air and your throat is still, but the rest of your mouth is in the same shape.
This is similar to how, for my accent at least, “v” and “f” are the same mouth shape, and one is voiced and the other isn’t.
Bringing back porn character? Sign me up.
Just start your own language. ænglish
Ænglø Sæxøn
Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yer?
See the løveli lakes
The wonderful telephøne system
And mani interesting furry animals
Including the majestic møøse
Why did I read this in the Swedish Chef’s accent?
Because you’ve never watched Monty Python I’d bet.
You could’ve watched Monty Python and still read it in the Swedish Chef’s accent.
I always read it in a Canadian accent, because I didn’t know what Swedish people sounded like when I watched it as a kid, so I just assumed they sound like Canadians. As is reasonable…
Swedish doesn’t have the ø or the æ, it uses ö and ä instead.
The only one it shares with the other skandinavisk languages is å.
That being said, nice reference.
Akshually, ø and æ aren’t part of the Swedish alphabet. They’re Danish and Norwegian. In Swedish you have ä and ö; å is common to the three languages.
This change absolutely nothing, but now you’re able to distinguish Swedish and Norwegian at a glance!
43 upvotes…
A Møøse once bit my sister …
No realli! She was Karving her initials on the møøse with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush given her by Svenge - her brother-in-law - an Oslo dentist and star of many Norwegian møvies: “The Høt Hands of an Oslo Dentist”, “Fillings of Passion”, “The Huge Mølars of Horst Nordfink”.
We apologise for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible have been sacked.
Mynd you, møøse bites Kan be pretty nasti …
We apologise again for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked.
Wait, the “o” in “holiday”, “lovely” sound different, so which is it?
Do they sound different in a Swedish accent?
No idea, but I’d expect the same letter to have the same pronunciation. On the flip side, you just proved that it’s not always the case haha
Neither actually. It sounds more like the e in permit or term, the u in uuh also gets close. They are not the most common sounds of the letter but I struggle to find analogous in English for the more common sound.
The ø sounds more like an ö from German. In fact, Swedish uses the ö instead if the ø.
The monty python slides are just a humørous stylization, nothing more
