{"id":5060,"date":"2012-02-06T12:03:56","date_gmt":"2012-02-06T12:03:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/?p=5060"},"modified":"2012-02-06T12:03:56","modified_gmt":"2012-02-06T12:03:56","slug":"the-great-swedish-vowel-shift","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/the-great-swedish-vowel-shift\/","title":{"rendered":"The great Swedish vowel shift"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last week, I continued my series on the three special Swedish letters, <em>\u00e5<\/em>, <em>\u00e4<\/em> and <em>\u00f6<\/em>. Now I&#8217;m here to explain how the letter <em>\u00e5<\/em> even came to be at all.<\/p>\n<p>As I explained last time, the letter <em>\u00e5<\/em> in writing came to be like so: first as a double-<em>a<\/em> (<em>aa<\/em>), then as an <em>a<\/em> with another, smaller <em>a<\/em> written over it, and finally a simplified <em>\u00e5<\/em>. But why exactly was there a double-<em>a<\/em> at all?<\/p>\n<p>The double-<em>a<\/em> was used to indicate a long <em>a<\/em>-sound, which eventually, over time, began to sound much like the long <em>o<\/em>-sound of that time (similar to today&#8217;s <em>\u00e5<\/em>); in other words, the long <em>a<\/em> became orally more closed. And while the long <em>a<\/em> became more and more like the long <em>o<\/em>, the long <em>o<\/em> became itself more closed, becoming closer and closer to the long <em>u<\/em>-sound of that time. And with that, the long <em>u<\/em>-sound became even more closed, evolving into a new sound: the Swedish long <em>u<\/em> we know and love today.<\/p>\n<p>In a more graphical form, the vowel shift looked like this:<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-5064\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/9\/2012\/02\/vowelshift.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"109\" height=\"58\" \/><\/p>\n<p>And that&#8217;s why today&#8217;s Swedish vowels are so different from the vowels of many other European languages although they are spellt the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<img width=\"109\" height=\"58\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/9\/2012\/02\/vowelshift.gif\" class=\"attachment-post-thumbnail size-post-thumbnail wp-post-image\" alt=\"\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" \/><p>Last week, I continued my series on the three special Swedish letters, \u00e5, \u00e4 and \u00f6. Now I&#8217;m here to explain how the letter \u00e5 even came to be at all. As I explained last time, the letter \u00e5 in writing came to be like so: first as a double-a (aa), then as an a&hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"post-item__readmore\"><a class=\"btn btn--md\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/the-great-swedish-vowel-shift\/\">Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":62,"featured_media":5064,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":""},"categories":[3079],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5060","post","type-post","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-swedish-language"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/62"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5060"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5066,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5060\/revisions\/5066"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}