Å and A are not at all the same letter. Although I agree that using characters outside of the ascii set for naming projects on the internet is probably a bad idea. If I had to translitterate Ålenkå to Latin chars, it would probably be Oolenko, but even that's not really that close. The Latin alphabet has a horribly limited set of vowels.
The transliteration of Å is usually "AA". In fact the "circle" above the A is really a lower case "a". It's just that as time passed, it "devolved" into a circle.
I always thought it was "oa". As in boat vs båt (the swedish word for boat). It is pronounced kinda like "oa", essentially a big round long "o" sound with the mouth muscles relaxing just before the sound is completed, making an OOO-a sound.
Yep, perfectly typable. Though I did have to look up the deadkey for ˚ as it's not a diacritic I use often (Option-K on the Mac OS X US Extended keymap; on Windows or Linux US International keymaps you can do it without a deadkey as Right-Alt W, or on the Mac US keymap as Option-A).
I highly recommend that people use and learn the "extended" or "international" keymaps on their system, so they can learn how to type these sorts of characters easily. As more and more systems are Unicode enabled, and you interact with more people internationally who would prefer their names to be spelled properly, it's a useful skill to have (and doesn't really take much work).
I wouldn't say it's related in any way to the alphabet in use. Take the English 'a' as an example: skate and car produce two different sounds out of the same letter.
Many alphabets do a good job transmitting sounds. Spanish, French or German are easy to read. English is particularly bad at having any correlation between spelling and pronunciation. "Spelling bee" would make little sense in most languages.
Sure, but F and E and completely different letters, even if they are almost identical (except for the little bar at the base of the E that is missing on the F).
A and Å are different letters, and can't be substituted for each other.
There are languages with true alphabets, ie. there is a one-to-one relation with written letters and sounds. A good example is Turkish. Once you learn the sounds of the 29 letters in the alphabet, you can perfectly pronounce all Turkish words.
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What's the point of using y instead of u?
Å and A are not at all the same letter. Although I agree that using characters outside of the ascii set for naming projects on the internet is probably a bad idea. If I had to translitterate Ålenkå to Latin chars, it would probably be Oolenko, but even that's not really that close. The Latin alphabet has a horribly limited set of vowels.
The transliteration of Å is usually "AA". In fact the "circle" above the A is really a lower case "a". It's just that as time passed, it "devolved" into a circle.
I always thought it was "oa". As in boat vs båt (the swedish word for boat). It is pronounced kinda like "oa", essentially a big round long "o" sound with the mouth muscles relaxing just before the sound is completed, making an OOO-a sound.
One benefit: it's very Googleable.
If you can type it.
Ålenkå.
Yep, perfectly typable. Though I did have to look up the deadkey for ˚ as it's not a diacritic I use often (Option-K on the Mac OS X US Extended keymap; on Windows or Linux US International keymaps you can do it without a deadkey as Right-Alt W, or on the Mac US keymap as Option-A).
I highly recommend that people use and learn the "extended" or "international" keymaps on their system, so they can learn how to type these sorts of characters easily. As more and more systems are Unicode enabled, and you interact with more people internationally who would prefer their names to be spelled properly, it's a useful skill to have (and doesn't really take much work).
I wouldn't say it's related in any way to the alphabet in use. Take the English 'a' as an example: skate and car produce two different sounds out of the same letter.
Alphabets transmit words, much less so sounds.
Many alphabets do a good job transmitting sounds. Spanish, French or German are easy to read. English is particularly bad at having any correlation between spelling and pronunciation. "Spelling bee" would make little sense in most languages.
Sure, but F and E and completely different letters, even if they are almost identical (except for the little bar at the base of the E that is missing on the F).
A and Å are different letters, and can't be substituted for each other.
In english. Other languages have a much stronger correlation between characters and sounds.
There are languages with true alphabets, ie. there is a one-to-one relation with written letters and sounds. A good example is Turkish. Once you learn the sounds of the 29 letters in the alphabet, you can perfectly pronounce all Turkish words.
> Alphabets transmit words, much less so sounds.
In English, that is. Some languages using latin script always use the same sound for the same letter (how it should be done, IMHO).