Aa or Å?

Danish has three letters not found in non-Scandinavian languages. 'Æ' is an amalgam of a and e, as you sometimes see in words like mediæval; while 'ø' is like the German 'ö', and is also used as the empty set in mathematics. The third one, 'å', was originally a long 'a' which gradually came to be written 'aa' (even though it is pronounced a bit like the o in the word go; the Danish word for go is, in fact, gå). Following a spelling reform in 1948, Danish adopted, instead of 'aa', the "bolle a" with the little o on top, which had been formally incorporated into Norwegian in 1917, and which had existed in Swedish as far back as the Middle Ages.

Who gives a ... , as my elder son would say? Well, some Danish people give a lot, for two reasons. The first is that 'a' is the first letter in the alphabet, whereas 'å' is the last one, so people flicking through an index of (say) place names are less likely to have the patience to get to the 'å' section at the end. That was the reason why the town of Aabenraa was given a dispensation, and allowed to retain its old-style spelling instead of changing to Åbenrå.

Secondly, in an electronic age dominated by the English language, it is felt that 'å' words are put at a disadvantage, since they can't be searched on the average English keyboard. That at any rate is the view of the city council of Århus, Denmark's second city. They have just decided that from 1 January next year, the name of the town will be Aarhus. Changing all of the signs will undoubtedly cost money; but that will be more than outweighed in their view by increased numbers of visits from simple-minded foreigners, who otherwise wouldn't have been able to find it.

Mmm. I have to admit I am not convinced by either of the above arguments. In fact, I have never seen the point of the extra letter; if it sounds like an 'o', why not just write 'o'? But then I am just a fåreigner.

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