Dictionaries and Alphabet
Dictionaries and the Danish Alphabet
How do I make those Danish letters?
Thanks to Jim Sindberg of Vancouver, Washington for the following:
The Danish alphabet has three vowels which do not occur in English. They
are �, �, and � and are placed at the end of the alphabet. The vowel � was previously
written aa and, in older indexes, may be found, in that form, at the beginning
of the alphabet. There are a couple of different ways to make these letters.
Please use them where appropriate. �lstrup and Olstrup, for example, are completely
different places in different parts of Denmark.
To make the ASCII characters using the "Alt" key on IBM keyboards, press
the "Alt" key and while holding it down press the following number combinations.
Be sure to use the number keypad on the right side of your keyboard and not
the numbers along the top. Also make sure that your "Num Lock" light is on for
this to work. A note of caution here; these characters may not display correctly
on some Mac machines and may look different according to what country setting
the keyboard is set up for.
Alt + 134 = �
Alt + 143 = �
Alt + 145 = �
Alt + 146 = �
Alt + 0248 = �
Alt + 0216 = �
Alt + 148 = �
Alt + 153 = �
Alt + 129 = �
Alt + 154 = �
There is also another way in Win95, which allows you to switch between languages
using shift-control as a language change toggle. When typing in English and
you wish to type a Danish special character, you can toggle to Danish, then
type the character, and toggle back to English. Easy. Fast. You can touch
type this way, even with your smaller notebook keyboard setup with 3 languages.
To setup your computer:
- go to Start
- go to Settings
- go to Control Panel
- go to Keyboard
- go to Language
- go to Add
- select the language(s) you want
- select OK and you are done
Now you should have a blue square in your tray. This blue square says En for
English or Da for Danish, etc. All you have to do when you want Danish characters
is to toggle to "Da" with shift-control and type semicolon for �, quote for
�, and [ for �. To make them caps, use shift just like in English. Since there
will be other keys changes, you may wish to toggle back to English immediately
after typing the Danish special characters. Remember the toggle is done very
quickly. A held shift-control is used in highlighting text. So you must toggle
quickly in order to get shift-control to toggle language changes instead of
highlighting.
By the way, the computer should be setup with:
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Don't ask why or how, but it seems important.
For Mac's, here are the keystrokes to accomplish the same thing: option +
O = �
option + o = �
option + " = �
option + ' = �
option + A = �
option + a = �
option + u, then O = �
option + u, then o = �
option + u, then U = �
option + u, then u = �
http://www.peter-doerling.de/Englisch/Sutterlin.htm
Suetterlin script: a script, created by L. Suetterlin, Berlin (1865-1917) ,
which was taught from 1915 to 1941 in German schools. It is also called the
"German handwriting". The writing is a standard form of the earlier,
very different chancery-writings. A careful study of these characters will help
you recognize many of the letters used in the Danish churchbook writings as
the handwriting is very similar.
http://www.hist.uib.no/gotisk/
This page is in Danish but all you have to do is click on the link at the top
that says "Alfabet" and a new window will pop up with all the letters
on the left. Click on any letter and several examples will display in the frame
on the right.
http://www.sa.dk/lak/brugearkivet/famhist/examples/dict.htm
It takes a while to load this page, but if you wait, it will show you some of
the words you will find in most records. You will get a translation into English,
and see what some of the words may look like in old Danish handwriting style.
More recent terms, e.g. for family relations etc. are not shown in handwriting.
http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Search/rg/frameset_rhelps.asp
Research Helps
Click on the letter "D" and scroll down to the Denmark listings. Here
you will find a Danish Genealogica Word List that also includes a description
of the church record christenings. Also there is a Danish Research Outline that
is very helpful.
http://www.travlang.com/
An excellent site for quick and easy translations of common words. It has both travel and language related services. One nice feature is the Word of the Day that can be e-mailed to you. Click on the link and you can hear the word spoken in the language of your choice.
http://www.winsite.com/bin/Info?1410
Tolken97 v3.2
A great down loadable shareware translating program that includes English, Danish,
Norwegian, Swedish, German, Spanish and French with some nifty extras that may
not be understood at first until you start using the program. Tolken does not
correct grammar and is missing words. However, one can get a vocabulary list
at the end of each translation... look up the words, add them yourself, and
save them in Tolken for the next time. Learn and customize. Don't forget to
send the "owner" in Sweden $15 as requested and you will get one update (included)
when that happens.
http://www.freedict.com/onldict/dan.html
This page contains a simple Danish to English and English to Danish dictionary. It also can translate 15 other languages. Additionally, it has a free dictionary program that you can download.
http://www.geocities.com/tsca.geo/dansk/index.html
Some time ago I searched the Web for a Danish grammar. I have found some, but... in Danish! -- it was of little use to a person not familiar with the language. So, having studied the subject for some time I decided to compile and put here my own short course of Danish Grammar in English. I hope you'll find it useful for your purpose (whatever it might be). I assume that you are familiar with basic grammar terms. All comments are welcome. And... I am not a native speaker of either English or Danish. So... :)
