HTC forgets Norwegian alphabet
Where did the Ø go?
The letter Ø is missing in HTC Desire HD touchscreen keyboards intended for the Norwegian market.
Ø dear.
This language faux pas* was uncovered today by Eurodroid, whose Norwegian correspondent Jostein tells the site:
I recently purchased the HTC Desire HD and quickly discovered that the Norwegian letter “Ø” is non-existent the messaging application, neither with the onboard keyboard or the downloaded ‘Scandinavian keyboard’ app from the Android Market. It, however, works perfect in the recipient field, in the mail application and web browser. I asked HTC about it, and it confirmed the problem:
A software fix is presumably in the works but HTC has nothing to announce yet, Eurodroid says.
Letters we don't have
The Norwegian alphabet has 29 letters - three appear after Z. They are Æ Ø Å.
Want to know how to pronounce them?
You can listen to the Sounds of Norway on Youtube.
*Faux pas
Google Translate renders faux pas in English as faux pas in Norwegian. It renders faux pas in French as snuble in Norwegian. Snuble in Norwegian is translated as stumble in English.
COMMENTS
The French for "faux pas"...
may well be something other than "faux pas". Many of the French expressions used in English are either obsolete in French or were never idiomatic French in the first place.
I seem to recall that these are called "faux amis". I have no idea what the French for this is - even less the Norwegian.
«Snuble» in Norwegian (both bokmål and nynorsk)
is a verb meaning to stumble or to stutter. «Faux pas», of course, is a noun phrase....
Henri
ae
It's still pretty much there in UK's spelling of words like paedophile, encyclopaedia, etc.
The Spanish language has used to have a couple of weird non-letter letters like "ch", "ll" which are really sounds, not letters. Thanks to technology these non-letters have been excised from the Spanish alphabet.
SMS Fail
I've noticed that a lot of recent phones and smartphones alike lack the acute tilde for SMS messages. áéíóú don't appear, except for é ... but the reverse tildes àèìòù do appear. I blame this lack of support for all that bad typing the Spanish-speaking-and-writing yoof have these days! Also, no ü character... lazy SMS people!
