back to article HTC forgets Norwegian alphabet

The letter Ø is missing in HTC Desire HD touchscreen keyboards intended for the Norwegian market. Ø dear. This language faux pas* was uncovered today by Eurodroid, whose Norwegian correspondent Jostein tells the site: I recently purchased the HTC Desire HD and quickly discovered that the Norwegian letter “Ø” is non-existent …

COMMENTS

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  1. Markus Wallett
    Boffin

    runes for rooneys

    English used to have two extra runic letters in its alphabet -- thorn for "th" and wyn for "double-u".

    1. John H Woods Silver badge

      and ...

      ... eth and yogh! And ash, (æ) which is still to be found reasonably often.

    2. Daniel B.

      ae

      It's still pretty much there in UK's spelling of words like paedophile, encyclopaedia, etc.

      The Spanish language has used to have a couple of weird non-letter letters like "ch", "ll" which are really sounds, not letters. Thanks to technology these non-letters have been excised from the Spanish alphabet.

  2. Colin Miller

    Faux Pas

    Google Translate, as most machine translators do, ignores any word that it doesn't recognise, assuming that it is a proper noun.

    Faux Pas translates literally as "false move" - I don't think it means "blunder" - so stumble isn't a bad literal translation.

    1. Phil 54
      Megaphone

      Sorry, pedant alert

      False step, not false move

  3. Bruno Girin

    Characters

    Reminds me of another faux pas I saw with a customer in a previous job. We were delivering a system for their operations in Turkey and it's when we did the first integration test that we discovered that their back-end system could deal with every Turkish special character, except for the first letter of the word İstanbul.

    1. Steve X

      happens with real keyboards too

      I remember many (many) years ago ordering a bunch of DEC terminals for programmers, and the ones we received had UK English keyboards, where the { and } characters had been replaced by ¼ and ¾. Made C programming somewhat tricky...

      Apparently DEC had so many complaints that they produced update kits: little plastic bags with 8 keytops in them, and instructions about how to prise the old ones off & clip the new ones on...

  4. The Fuzzy Wotnot
    Pint

    Face-slap

    Do any of these companies do any testing with their target markets? I appreciate it takes time and money and PR droids are always setting impossible deadlines, but how much is this going to cost in time and effort, plus lost sales?

  5. Arctic fox

    All you need is vowels

    Many moons ago during an election campaign the Norwegian Labour party when campaigning in North Norway made use of the North Norwegians contempt for consonants by using a poster slogan which when translated into English meant "I am also in the Labour party". All they needed to do was print posters with "Æ E I A Æ Å" to convey that sentiment. Amazing how much information one can convey with only a few vowels.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Badgers

    Faux Pas

    So what is "stumble" in English translated into French?

    We demand to know!

  7. Ian Ferguson
    Headmaster

    I think you've find the correct Norwegian terminology is...

    Baller opp

  8. Daniel B.
    FAIL

    SMS Fail

    I've noticed that a lot of recent phones and smartphones alike lack the acute tilde for SMS messages. áéíóú don't appear, except for é ... but the reverse tildes àèìòù do appear. I blame this lack of support for all that bad typing the Spanish-speaking-and-writing yoof have these days! Also, no ü character... lazy SMS people!

  9. mhenriday
    Headmaster

    «Snuble» in Norwegian (both bokmål and nynorsk)

    is a verb meaning to stumble or to stutter. «Faux pas», of course, is a noun phrase....

    Henri

  10. Kubla Cant

    The French for "faux pas"...

    may well be something other than "faux pas". Many of the French expressions used in English are either obsolete in French or were never idiomatic French in the first place.

    I seem to recall that these are called "faux amis". I have no idea what the French for this is - even less the Norwegian.

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