Talk:Danish orthography

Older spellings?

In older (German-language) grammar books one can find Danish spellings with an additional j like kjön or kjøn instead of kön or køn (gender), and like kjende- instead of kende-. This is missing here. -eXplodit (talk) 17:05, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

Just came here on exactly this point, having failed to find the place Sakskjøbing, which is now spelled Sakskøbing - similarly with Kjøbenhavn > København. My guess is that the change dates from the 1948 spelling reforms, which are mentioned in passing here, and in Retskrivningsordbogen (and its Danish WP equivalent). A summary of the changes would be a useful addition here.Davidships (talk) 11:35, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

My understanding (based on having seen some texts from different eras) is that the shift to drop the j from such combinations occurred much earlier than 1948, possibly back near the end of the 19th or beginning of the 20th century, but I can't find any sources for this. As far as I can work out, there wasn't even an official orthography until 1888, the main features of which are described in this freely accessible JSTOR article. Before then there were prestige works and publishers who set the de facto standards for their eras. In any case the Danish article on Retskrivning does have some useful information and links (especially this one), as well as some examples that could be used in addition to the Russian version of this page which I will be happy to look at more closely when I get some time. Helrasincke (talk) 09:41, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

"oe" for "ø"

In German, it is correct to substitute "oe" for "ö" if the latter can't be used, e.g. when using ASCII. The equivalent transformation has been used in Danish, e.g. in the name of Hans Christian Ørsted ("Oersted"), but is this considered correct? Hairy Dude (talk) 14:29, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

No, ø is a separate letter not a ligature or accented letter. So while oe is often used when ø can't be, but it is not correct. Similarly ae for æ is not correct either, but aa for å is more confused, since it was a ligature 100 years ago, and using aa can be considered historic spelling, or for some proper nouns, the preferred spelling. Carewolf (talk) 15:53, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Though for Ørsted in particular, I guess he is old enough to have written in Latin, so he might have an official latinized name.Carewolf (talk) 15:55, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Orthography versus Alphabet

This article at present seems to be almost entirely about the Danish alphabet, with very little mention of how it is used (orthography). The request above for "older spellings" touches on this, but we're missing more common concerns as well, for example the "silent" letters in "mand", "grund", and "hver". A discussion of these would be relevant in this article. Comparison of Norwegian Bokmål and Standard Danish#Writing system accidentally does a better job of describing how the alphabet is used than this article in its comparisons of Norwegian and Danish. Unfortunately, that section of the article is poorly sourced, so I am not comfortable copying that information into this article. The Dansk Sprognævn website has a section on spelling rules (but sadly no information on the development of these rules that I can find), perhaps someone better at reading Danish than I am can use it to add to this article. Eishiya (talk) 23:34, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

É

An edit was recently made stating that "É" is a letter of the Danish alphabet and adding "Ê" to the alphabet list, listing its pronunciation as "/ê/ or /êː/". Firstly, the circumflex is a tone marker in standard IPA, and I'm not certain what quality this was intended to convey. Secondly I know that the letter is to some extent officially used in loans such as "café", where its pronunciation as far as I know is /eː/ [e̝ː], as well as to differentiate homographs as stated lower down on the page. I am not Danish and speak very little of the language so if this issue hasn't been dealt with before and someone with knowledge of whether the acute accented E is considered a letter in its own right and not a variation of E could fix this it would be great. Rurfs (talk) 04:26, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

É is NOT a letter in the Danish alphabet. We can write é but it is just an e with emphasis. Danish optionally mark emphasis in certain words and forms, in particular in short imperative words the vowel get an accent, and in some specific words like idé (idea), the e is accented to show a longer emphasized final syllable. The accent however is entirely optional and you can write correctly with or without it. And if é is to be considered a letter then ǿ is also a letter. Carewolf (talk) 16:50, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Issues with "Correspondence between sound and spelling"

Right now, the correspondence table is unclear for ⟨e⟩ and I don't know how to read the table. It says "in most cases" for both [e:] and [ε]. So does the first one, [e:], take precedence, and in the remaining few cases is [ε] the most likely replacement? Or are [e:] and [ε] the most likely choices in two mutually exclusive cases (e.g. followed by a single vs. double consonant)? I think this point needs to be clarified.

In addition, the examples given sometimes contain the letter in question more than once. It would help to highlight the specific vowel to which the rule applies. --Bfx0 (talk) 19:07, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

It looks like a distinction between open syllables giving [e:] and closed giving [ε], but I'm not sure it really holds up (e.g. how to account for the difference between ende and leve and ene; I can only come up with something conflicting). Maybe the "when followed by two consonants" would work somewhat if nd is counted as two. In general, the whole table needs sourcing and also clean-up (probably including a lot of deletion). Formatting would be very welcome. Replayful (talk) 15:38, 9 August 2023 (UTC)