Talk:hedelmä

Hedelmae

There is a demogroup called "Hedelmae". What does this suggest to a Finn? Is it a quirky misspelling like "Froot"? Equinox ◑ 00:55, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

It is a common practice in some European languages (particularly German) to replace Ä and Ö with AE and OE if Ä and Ö cannot be used for technical reasons. (Why Ä -> AE, Ö -> OE? Because that's how the letters themselves originally developed; see Diaeresis (diacritic)#History 2.) This poses little issue for those languages, but it has also spread to other languages, including the Scandinavian ones and from there also to Finnish. It also sees international use in legacy systems that don't support Unicode, like all kinds of official travel documents. That name is obviously a reference to this practice, as I doubt many old computers supported umlauts, not the very least out of the box.

For Finnish in particular however this practice is not ideal, because Ä and Ö are not only considered separate letters in Finnish (like in other Scandinavian languages) that are not interchangeable with any other letters, but the letter combinations AE and OE are completely valid in Finnish and show up in plenty of words (koe, tae...). Not only does this pose a risk of confusion (which is admittedly slight, I cannot come up with immediate examples), but it makes text hard to read. With this system, the fairly common surname Hämäläinen gets spelled as Haemaelaeinen, which just sounds funny. — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 22:21, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

I see. So conceivably it could vaguely feel like reading "cooperate" (without umlaut or hyphen) and thinking the first syllable is "coop" as in chickens. Equinox ◑ 01:52, 20 March 2022 (UTC)