What sound did å stand for?

[Deleted]

Yeah, pretty much what the title says.

What sound did the letter å (a with the little circle) represent before the Mass Edit of 2007? Also, what reason was it eliminated for? Ça esteva alofon? Ça tro uçeva darar? Parce qe voi zecidevetz?

(Tell me if I made mistakes)

[Ián B. Anglatzarâ]

Jan 6, 2017 15:17:34 GMT -6 Iac Marscheir said:

Yeah, pretty much what the title says. What sound did the letter å (a with the little circle) represent before the Mass Edit of 2007? Also, what reason was it eliminated for? Allophonic? Too rarely used? 'Cause we felt like it?

I was stolen from Norwegian and I assume it was pronounced the same way as in Norwegian, approximately like the vowel sound in 'law' (Southern British pronunciation). I don't know why the 2007 Arestada abolished it.

[Deleted]

Kinda interesting. I think it's cool that, despite being only 40 years old, Talossan has evolved as much as any "natural" language.

[Sir C. M. Siervicül]

There were two basic reasons for abolishing å. First, because there appeared to be no minimal pairs between a and å except for ar/år, it was thought that å was probably not an independent phoneme. Second, the existence of a plethora of different diacritics marking different vowel qualities made it impossible to consistently mark irregular stress, and being able to do so was thought more important than marking nonphonemic vowel quality distinctions.

You can see some of the early discussion of some of the proposals that went into the 2007 Arestada in this thread.