Is anyone here using a Ben System with Swedish?
If Swedish has only 9 vowels (AOUÅEIYÄÖ), what do you use for the 10th digit? Or is there a better way of assigning the vowels?
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Swedish differentiates between long and short vowels, like English. The two have slightly different sounds. Thus, I suspect the tenth vowel would be a long/short variation of one of them. Easy fix. Non-native speaker of Swedish, but I’d assume a Swede would come up with something similar.
Finnish is worse. There is no way to tell apart long and short vowels other than a literal difference in length, so Finnish ää is just ä but held for longer. Also, å in Finnish is only used in Swedish loanwords and is identical in pronunciation to o, neither of which is true in Swedish.
Finnish is also missing many consonants, like b, g, ch, etc. In fact, no value for the 6 sound in the Major System exists in Finnish, so I’d reassign j (pronounced like English y) to that spot. The rest is fine as you’d get one consonant per sound.
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Hey, I bump this thread. Swedish has 9 vowels but they can all be long or short so 18 “sounds” in total.
I’m thinking of making a system with each short/long vowel pair represent one number.
My problem is the tenth vowel. I can go 2 ways about this.
- To split one of the short/long vowel pairs.
- To add a foreign vowel sound (preferably english).
My questions:
If 1. What vowel pair do you suggest I split?
If 2. What foreign vowel sound do you suggest?
Is there a way to find out which vowel sounds are the most common in a language?