Talk:Danish and Norwegian alphabet

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[edit] Splitting languages

Even if the alphabets are identical it would be an idea to split it on separate entries for Danish and Norwegian. The Swedish and Finnish alphabets are identical but split on separate entries. -- Mic

Historically, they were one and the same, so I don't really see the need to split. An addition there is really not very much information to split, anyway. But not a big issue for me, either way... Egil 17:24 Apr 15, 2003 (UTC)

[edit] From VFD

  • Danish and Norwegian alphabet - orphan (hence unnecessary) disambiguation-style page, cannot be made into a sensible redirect. However, does contain edit histories for Danish alphabet and Norwegian alphabet. Onebyone 05:19, 4 Jan 2004 (UTC)
    • Delete. A note on each page (DK alpha + N alpha) to say it's similar to the other, definitely, but this one isn't even a disambig page. -- Francs2000 06:40, 4 Jan 2004 (UTC)
    • Actually, I'd prefer we move them back to here, in keeping with the way we have one page on Cyrillic alphabet instead of a dozen pages on each slight variation. It's highly confusing to have such redundant articles: instead have one article that in a single sentence points out that they differ in a grand total of one character. --Delirium 01:30, Jan 9, 2004 (UTC)
    • Keep, (maybe add a note on how they;re the same on this page) It's a good thing when a disambiguation page is orphaned. What's to keep it from being orphaned in the future? I agree with Delirium on this one, though. --Jiang 19:37, 10 Jan 2004 (UTC)

"as in German, and that the letter W is always a separate letter in Norwegian and Danish."

can somebody please explain what's written here? I simply do not understand, what does it mean that 'W' is a 'separate letter'? isn't every letter 'separate'?
See Swedish alphabet. "The other feature is omission of the letter "W", which is seen as a variant of "V", even though it is still recognised and maintained in names." Rep 23:22, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Good thing that paragraph was deleted, it is the other way around. I don't know when the change took place in Norway, but W wasn't recognized as a letter in Danish before 1980. Until then, it was merely considered to be a variation of the letter 'V' and words using it were alphabetized accordingly (example. Pre-1980: Wales, Vallø, Washington, Wedellsborg, Vendsyssel. Post-1980: Vallø, Vendsyssel, Wales, Washington, Wedellsborg.) A common Danish children's song about the alphabet still states that the alphabet has 28 letters (the last line reads "28 skal der stå", i.e. "that makes twenty-eight"). Since 1980, the correct number of letters has been 29. --Valentinian 14:47, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
Interesting info about the Danish switch in 1980. I've added it to the article, it is certainly worthy of mention. In Norwegian, W has "always" been a separate letter. (In the alphabet and in alphabetization -- for pronounciation it is still considered an orthographic variation of V). Due to the Scandinavian common history, it is not unlikely that V and W were one at some point, but checking an encyclopedia from 1933, they were certainly different, and the Norwegian alphabet had 29 letters then (including the Å). So if "always" is truly always I don't know, it would be interesting to find out. -- Egil 16:44, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
Talking of Å, the story about the placement of the Å in the Danish alphabet between 1948 and 1955 is interesting. It seems the initial proposal was Å-A-B-C-... [1] -- Egil 17:02, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Vertical box formatting

30-Aug-2007: Vertical boxes must be placed after wide horizontal tables in an article, to avoid space/gap conflicts. On 22-Aug-2007, the list of letters were converted to wide horizontal tables, causing a large text-gap (over 40 lines long) at the vertical navigation-boxes. To close that large text-gap, I have moved the templates for the vertical nav-boxes after the wide table definitions, eliminating the 40-line gap. The vertical nav-boxes were only lowered about 10 lines to fit. -Wikid77 11:59, 30 August 2007 (UTC)