Page:A simplified grammar of the Danish language.djvu/23

Rh represent the letter by one character only, the ö, as used in Swedish, should be accepted.

From all that has been said of the transition state of Dano-Norwegian writing, the reader will understand that he must be prepared to meet with a perplexing variety of spelling among Danish and Norwegian writers. These orthographic variations extend even to the order in which certain letters are given in dictionaries. Thus the authorized Dansk-Retskrivnings-Ordbog (Danish Spelling-Manual) of Svend Gruntvig, 1870, gave å for aa after the letter y , followed by æ, ö and ø. The Dansk Hand-Ordbog, which was issued by the same author in 1872, at the express orders of the Ministry for Education, which recommended its use to all colleges and schools in Denmark, differs however wholly from its predecessor, both as to the writing and place in the alphabet of this letter, for here aa is placed first among the letters, and is no longer represented by å. Another retrograde movement in this dictionary is that j is restored to its old place after g or k, when followed by a soft vowel, as Kjöbenhavn, 'Copenhagen.' In most other essential points, however, the two dictionaries are in harmony; and it was announced when the Hand-Ordbog appeared, that the object proposed by its publication was not to supersede the Retskrivnings-Ordbog of 1870, but to facilitate its acceptance by the general public. This aim has not as yet been fully attained, for although, as we have already stated, many of the best writers have accepted, in toto, the reformed system of spelling on which the dictionary of 1870 was based, a very large number of Danes