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Why is “ø y” a no for Denmark, but a yes for Norway? I’m pretty sure both countries have the same alphabet?
it's not "ø", "y", it's "øy" in combination (as a digraph?)
same as "th" further down not implying the N languages don't have "t" or "h", just that they don't have "th"
Aha thanks for the explanation.
The "øy" is written without a space between the letters, which seems to mean that these letters occur together in words (more obvious example: "eau" leads into French).
The problem is that we can put words together to form new words. So say I produced a yogurt at a lake(sø) , I could call it søyougurt. It's not a word that would be in a dictionary though, but lots of that kind of words aren't.
Maybe within one syllable then?
I mean, I'm not looking to defend this diagram, I have no idea if it's correct. And frankly I would be surprised if it is anything more than an approximation, since language is always messy.