[Freeciv-Dev] Re: (PR#9838) Spelling mistake in data/nation/danish.ruleset

["Ole Laursen" <olau@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

<URL: http://rt.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=9838 >

"Mateusz Stefek" <mstefek@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

> <URL: http://rt.freeciv.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=9838 >

[...]

>> There's a small (but annoying) spelling mistake in
>> data/nation/danish.ruleset. The Danish city of Aalborg is spelled as
>> "Ålborg":
>> 
>>   cities =
>>     "København", "Århus", "Odense", "Ålborg", "Esbjerg", "Randers", 
>> 
>> It should be spelled as "Aalborg". I'm myself sitting in Aalborg
>> writing this, that's why I know it. :-)

[...]

> Good news! Ålborg is also spelled Aalborg. Thats one charset problem less! 
>
> As I can see in Wikipedia, Århus is the same.
> Why these cities are spelled in two ways?

"aa" and "å" is thought of as the same letter with the same
pronunciation. But the "circle-å" is a somewhat new invention in
Danish - it was made the official spelling of the letter "aa"/"å" in
1948. For some reason, some cities retained their old spelling with
"aa", although most didn't. There's a related problem with surnames.
It is relatively common that surnames end in "-gård" (which means
farm), e.g. Søndergård (literally "Southern farm"), but one frequently
encounters "-gaard" instead.

All the everyday words in Danish are spelled with "å", though, e.g.
"stå" (to stand), "tå" (toe), etc.

On a related note, sometimes "aa" is actually just a clash of two
"a"s and should hence not be pronunced as an "å", for instance if you
combine a word that ends with "a" with one that begins with "a".


One of my friends were bitten by the spelling bug in Freeciv - when
Freeciv suggested "Ålborg", he corrected it to "Aalborg", but then
next time it suggested "Ålborg" again and he accidentally accepted,
thus ending up with two Aalborgs. You should have heard his curses. :-)


Hope you enjoyed the explanation,

-- 
Ole Laursen
http://www.cs.aau.dk/~olau/