The Danish alphabet


So what is this thing about my last name having a different letter in it?

You see, the danish alphabet has 28 letters in it:



(-well, the’w’ has been added too by now, - but for our purposes, it has just been a variation on the letter ’v’).


As you’ll notice, we have three extra wovels at the end of the alphabet that ya’ll don’t have!

Without these wovels, we couldn’t spell the gutteral sounds that go into the good old Norse languages. :-)

Norway and Sweden use the same alphabet, - except in Sweden, they draw two of them with double dots instead:



- And to confuse even more, in Denmark, before 1948 we wrote the last letter differently:




So what?


When computers came to use, an ignorant American (-Sorry!) didn’t think of all the other languages in the world but his own, and made a table of number-codes to represent the letters in the alphabet, called ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange).
- And ASCII got to define how letters are handled by computers all over the world, causing a lot of confusion, whenever foreign languages with their ’non-standard letters’ had to be transfered among systems...

Even now, I can’t be sure that the fonts installed on y’alls computer has the letters in them that will show my name correctly!

So for internet purposes, I write my name Steen Hoyer.
You’ll just have to imagine the slash over the O that really makes it a different letter.
There is a hidden code for the letter - so I can show you an ’ø’! - It’s just that the code is made up by other people who think the slash is like a French accent, - you know Trés Bien’, - and not a letter on its own...

Anyway - Høyer


Originally, it was my middle name, and I got it from my father’s mother. I was baptised with the full name: Steen Høyer Madsen.
My parents wanted my brother and me to have my grandmother’s name as a middle name.
By the time we all met in Georgia, my last name Madsen was a very common name in Denmark. Actually, the majority of the Danish population shared just 14 different family names! The most common by then being Nielsen.
So I and many others preferred to use the middle name instead, for easier distinction.
At a later time, the possibility of changing your name officially came about, - and my brother changed his name to Høyer.
It wasn’t until Jette and I got married, though that I had my name cut short officially too.

So that’s why my website - and my main email address has ended in steenhoyer.dk for the last 15 years...