But then the Czechs show up, and I confess, it all overwhelms me a little. And yet, the NHL hasn’t wanted to put those accents on jerseys up to now.įor me, it’s very easy to remember our former prospect’s name was Hållander, because “å” and “a” are wildly different letters, as different as how you’d expect to say Hall and Holl. Those French names are usually easier to remember for Anglo Canadians because, if you took French, you likely have a hazy memory of how those work. Rosén is a name with a non-Swedish origin so it has that accent, just like the ones we are used to from French class. If you speak Finnish and really get the front and back vowel difference and say it in your head (and out loud) the right way, you likely go through life spelling names correctly all the time.īack to those Marlies. Rasmus Ristolainen is correct, Jarmo Kekalainen is not, and yet that is how it appears on the Blue Jackets’ website. Finnish has the same alphabet as Swedish, but to make it fun, the common surname suffix “lainen” sometimes has an “a” and sometimes an “ä”. I call this a trend because the Marlies last year had Calle Rosén, Filip Král and Veini Vehviläinen. We have the diaresis in English, we just don’t use it much anymore, but coöperation used to always be written like that to tell you to pronounce the second o.įor Brännström, it tells you to say ö and not o.
#SWEDISH A WITH UMLAUT HOW TO#
Those are letters of the Swedish alphabet, but the origin of the diacritic that’s part of the letter ä or ö, and what it tells you to do with your month, is the same.īack when printers had to figure out how to put things like æ or œ into a typeface, some of them started putting the e above the vowel, and over time it evolved to two dots like a diaresis. His teammate Erik Brännström thought that was lovely, and he wanted his name spelled correctly too. (Note: it’s entirely possible someone got this done before him, but he’s the vanguard of the current trend.) Photo by David Kirouac/Icon Sportswire via Getty ImagesĪnd he has it on his jersey. The diacritic mark of two dots, also called a diaresis, is called an umlaut in many languages, notably German (and notably not Swedish, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves) when it tells you how to sound the vowel.
It’s not actually the all-purpose term for two dots over a letter in all cases. The word umlaut means “sound alteration” in German, and refers to how a vowel is pronounced in a certain situation. It all started, it seems, with an umlaut. Note: for the summer, in lieu of any news on Mondays, I’m going to try to blog about something each week.