runes for rooneys
English used to have two extra runic letters in its alphabet -- thorn for "th" and wyn for "double-u".
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 …
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.
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.
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of DEC terminals for programmers, and the ones we received had UK English keyboards, where the { and } characters had been replaced by ¼ and ¾.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...
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.
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!
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.