flowering_sun_star t1_itu0zmd wrote on October 26, 2022 at 9:03 AM

Reply to comment by Snooderblade in Archaeologists have found the 17th-century warship Applet: Maritime experts believe wreck is sister-ship of Vasa, which sank off Stockholm in 1629 by MeatballDom

Q is a consonant, while O is a vowel that can have many different pronunciations. They perform very different roles.

It's hard for an English speaker to understand where you're coming from because in English a vowel can have many different pronunciations, and we are comfortable with that. We also understand that other languages use diacritics to provide hints on pronunciation.

It seems really weird to us to insist that a character, and that character with diacritics, are fundamentally different things. Especially when the base character in an English text could reasonably be used to represent both those sounds. And remember that this is all in the context of an English language text!

I'm perhaps just surprised at how up-tight all the swedes are over a simple choice in transliteration. Maybe it is you who need the reminder that not all languages share an alphabet?

Snooderblade t1_itu429o wrote on October 26, 2022 at 9:48 AM

But it’s not an A with diacritics! A and Ä are objectively different letters, using an A (which in english sounds nothing like Ä no matter how you pronounce it) is misleading. You can’t just switch letters based on looks without regard for the sounds they represent. Case in point the closest letter to Ä is E, not A, the official way to transliterate Ä in english is Ae and if you look at the actual article they use Ä aswell.