Description

This article is from the Nordic countries FAQ, by Antti Lahelma and Johan Olofsson, with numerous contributions by others.

1.2.4 Why are all the names and stuff garbled?

The Nordic alphabets contain letters that aren't in the English
alphabet and consequently may cause problems with viewing if your
system hasn't been properly set. In this document, they are typed in
the ISO-8859-1 multi-lingual 8-bit character set, also known as
Latin-1, which is the most available of the 8-bit character set, and
also the standard for hypertext HTML documents.

If your system strips the 8th bit, they may appear for example as the
letters {fedv}, which can be quite confusing, making e. g. some Nordic
place-names appear different from what they should be. In case 8-bit
characters don't show well on your screen, please consider testing
another setup.

Here's a short guide to the most common of the letters:

letter      description
-+--+-      -+--+--+---
  ä         'a' diaeresis
  æ         'ae' written as a single letter
  ö         'o' diaeresis
  ø         'o' with a slash through it
  å         'a' with a ring above it
  ð         "eth"; a vertically mirrored '6'
            with a slash through the tail
  þ         "thorn"; a 'p' with the vertical
            line extended above the loop

There are capital letters also
==============================

  Á         capital A-acute (á)
  Å         capital A-ring (å)
  Ä         capital A-diaeresis (ä)
  Æ         capital AE-ligature (æ)
  Ð         capital eth (ð)
  É         capital E-acute (é)
  Í         capital I-acute (í)
  Ó         capital O-acute (ó)
  Ø         capital O-slash (ø)
  Ö         capital O-diaeresis (ö)
  Þ         capital thorn (þ)
  Ú         capital U-acute (ú)
  Ý         capital Y-acute (ý)

---> PLEASE NOTICE <---

If the above letters aren't displayed correctly, read the GRAPHEMES
FAQ by Tor Slettnes on how to view them (in part 1.8 of this document,
where also a direction to their pronunciation is included).

The Latin-1 character set is commonly used in s.c.nordic and some
other newsgroups; you will need it anyway in order to be able to
properly follow them. In the future it will probably become the
standard set all over the Internet. Setting it up is no big job, and
you'll be in the forefront of progress if you do! :-)

[ However, the Latin-6 (ISO-8859-10) character set would strictly
speaking be more appropriate since it covers also letters neccessary
for the Saami and Greenlandish languages. ]

 

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• prev: 1.2.3 Who are the net-gods and goddesses of s.c.n?
• Index
• next: 1.2.5 What should I know about copyright laws and the Usenet?

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