• VibeSurgeon@piefed.social
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    7 hours ago

    How to pronounce Swedish umlauted vowels:

    Å => how the British pronounce “awe”, “oo” in “floor”

    Ä => how the Americans pronounce the “a” in “cat”

    Ö => “ea” in “earl”, “yearn” or “u” in “turn”

    • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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      3 hours ago

      Oh I’ll add the Estonian ones because we’ve got fun ones

      Ü - pretty much does not exist in English, you might hear it in a weird dialect, apparently in the word “few” as spoken by scousers and some South Africans?

      Õ - same preface, apparently you might hear a person from Cardiff pronounce “foot” this way or a southern USian might say “nut” this way, but I’ve never heard either.

      Ö and Ä are the same as in Swedish and we do not have Å

      • Noobnarski@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        So ä ö and ü are pronounced the same as in German?

        Then i’d just have to learn how to say å and õ if I visit the Baltics or Scandinavia.

        • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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          3 hours ago

          Yes, ü sounds like the ü in über and ö like Österreich at least. I’m not entirely sure about the German vs Estonian pronunciation of ä. Sounds closer to the ä in Käfer than the ä in Käse if you go to wiktionary and listen to the example pronunciations. I did study German in school because it sounded preferable to learning an entire new alphabet and recall the German ä was taught as sort of a cross between the Estonian ä and Estonian e, leaning towards one or the other depending on context, but then again I’m not sure how good my German teachers were, I know I only ever had two or three English teachers out of like 8 or 9 that actually spoke the language and knew how to pronounce words.