Ø

"?", "?" is a vowel and a letter used in the Danish, Faroese and Norwegian alphabets.

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Amongst the English vowels it sounds the most like the "ir" in "bird" http://www.faqs.org/faqs/nordic-faq/part1_INTRODUCTION/section-7.html or the "ur" in "hurt" http://www.hadelandlag.org/1921/norseltrs.htm, as pronounced in a non-rhotic accent, like Received Pronunciation. The name of the letter is the same as the sound it makes.

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The origin of the letter is a ligature for the diphthong "oe" (the horizontal line of the "e" being written across the "o") that has become a letter in itself.

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In modern Danish, Faroese and Norwegian, the letter is a unique vowel (IPA ), and neither a diphthong, a ligature, nor a variant of the letter "O". As one Norwegian tour guide put it, "It's not an 'O' with a slash, it's an '?'!"

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In the Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Tatar, Finnish, Swedish, Icelandic, German, Estonian, and Hungarian alphabets, the letter "?" is the equivalent. Cyrillic alphabet has "?" as the equivalent letter, which are used in the Cyrillic alphabets for Kazakh, Mongolian, Azerbaijani etc.

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In Danish (and the more conservative, Danish-influenced Norwegian) spelling, ? is a word all by itself meaning island.

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The symbol "?" is also used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to indicate the sound of the Danish and Norwegian letter, the close-mid front rounded vowel.

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For computers, when using the ISO 8859-1 or Unicode sets, the codes for '?' and '?' are respectively 216 and 248, or D8 and F8 in hexadecimal.

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On the Apple Macintosh operating system it can by typed by pressing the key then typing O or o. On Microsoft Windows it can by typed by holding down the key while typing 0216 or 0248 on the numeric keypad, provided the system uses code page 1252 as system default. The Unicode letter name is "Latin capital/small letter O with stroke". In HTML character entity references, required in cases where the letter is not available by ordinary coding, the codes are Ø and ø. In the X Window System environment, one can produce these characters by depressing the Multi key with a slash and then striking an o or O. In some systems, such as older versions of MS-DOS, the letter ? is not part of the default codepage. In this case, unless additional codepages (such as the Scandinavian ones) are installed, a double-striked Y replaces ?, while a ? sign replaces ?.

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Vowel: In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language that is characterized by an open configuration of the vocal tract where there is no build-up of air pressure above the glottis, in contrast to consonants, which are characterized by a constriction or closure at one or more points along the vocal tr...

Letter: A letter is a written message from one party to another. Letters are usually intended to be received by someone far away. Before widespread availability of typewriters and computers, letters were always written by hand. Nowadays, letters are only widely used by companies who send out letters to larg...

Danish: Danish may refer to:...