SV: Swedes and character names in strange languages [mostly OT]

[Stefan Persson]

Sigvald Grøsfjeld jr. wrote:

> Well then both types of readers should be respected by the publisher.

Then you would end up having to include every name for every character 
in every language, which would require WAY too much space in the book.

> Bah!! That's only because noone else have botthered to complain.

Which is probably because there's no need for complaints.

> Oh, yes they have indeed. By showing such interest for Rich's topic that is.

We have only stated that we are interested in Chinese names, not 
anything else.  I find it interesting with the Japanese names, but would 
have preferred some kind of transcription of the Arabic names, 
preferrably in IPA or Japanese.

> That was only a stupid joke in order to get attention.

It did not look like that.

> No, I have never had any problems with those two characters - and IMO they
> are a part of the Latin alphabeth just like our own æ and å, the German ü,
> etc. Norwegian and Danish kids unfamiliar with those letters would have no
> problems finding someone to help explaining those characters for them.

The Latin ALPHABET only includes characters used in Latin language.  The 
last three letters in the Swedish, Norwegian and Danish alphabets are 
part of the Latin SCRIPT, though.

> For the outsiders I can add that (ä = æ and ö = ø) so the way the letters
> look in the Scandinavian languages is the only difference.

"Ä" and "æ" are different characters, just like "ö" and "ø" are 
different.  The fact that they are pronounced the same way, share the 
same origin & are coded the same way in Morse code is unimportant.  "Ö" 
and "ø" may both appear in the same text---for example, in a Swedish 
text about you, "ø" would be used for writing your name, while "ö" would 
be used everywhere else.  Thus, they are different characters.

> For example: in
> Norwegian Text-TV the swedish variants are often used instead of the
> Norwegian ones.

Some language versions of MS-DOS do not include "æ" and "ø" but only "ä" 
and "ö."  This might be the reason to Text-TV using Swedish 
characters---Text-TV might be limited to some ancient character set.

Stefan