@kaffeehaeferl @SnoopJ @Elizafox @Daveography @Illuminatus
Slightly related: we see this in Arabic all the time. It mostly comes from the fact that the people making the tattoos can read the Arabic alphabet but don’t understand what it means, or how to join the letters.
The worst offenders are Arabic letters not joined up and written left to right 😅
@Sobtanian @apzpins most of the time they get pronounced the way they would were they without diacritics or other visual transformations, for example "ø" is pronounced the way "o" would in the target language.
These letters' pronunciations vary between languages, for example the "ä" in Swedish and German denote different acoustic characteristics and behave differently in regard to neighboring letters. These are just letters (graphemes) not sounds (phonemes).
Also, general assumptions about the sound of different languages are often incorrect, Swedish "Göteborg" being a nice example.
(I'm simplyfing some concepts for the sake of legibility)
@Sobtanian At least in Finnish the ä and a are different letters, not accents, so replacing an ä with an a is just as legit as replacing an x with a k because they kinda sorta look alike.
But that one letter replacement will absolutely change the meaning of words. The classic example being "näin" = "I saw" and "nain" = "I married" or "I fucked" in casual language.
Now imagine telling you saw your all your friends this weekend and then drop the ä dots.
How about the clothes' label "Napapijri"? It is the Finnish word for Arctic Circle, with one letter swapped for another for no good reason.
And then it has the flag of Norway.