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I'm pretty sure that the sound examples are reversed. Home: [hoʊm] (or maybe [hoːm]) Bored: [bɔɹd]
Ångström
The angstrom symbol isn't a separate meaning -- it's the same symbol.
That is silly - it is obviously a separate meaning. The main entry for Å should be for the letter, including typographic represenation, sound and grammar issues. Å as a symbol for a unit of measure is a totally different meaning. I have no intention of starting an edit war, however. -- Egil
To clarify this debate for those who come in later, the question raised is whether the Å introducing the discussion of ångstrom units should be bolded or not. Repetitions of the bolded article title are bolded in two cases:
When it is a different name for the subject of the article.
When it is a different subject, as the town of Å is bolded.
The current case is somewhat doubtful, but it seems to me that clarity is served by erring on the side of caution and bolding the Å for ångstrom units.
There are two things called "Å": the symbol Å and the town Å. The symbol is used as a letter in various alphabets and also as an abbreviation for a metric unit, the angstrom. But notice that the metric unit is the angstrom (or ångström), not the Å. Similarly, æ is not a sound, it is a symbol: a letter in various alphabets and also in the International Phonetic Alphabet, where it reprsents a certain sound. At best, [æ] is a sound (but I haven't linked to an article on it since we don't have articles on individual sounds). Our article Æ rightly reflects this.
the town Å
I was also thinking that the town should be moved to its own page, since we have about a reasonable amount of material on each subject. I don't think that anybody will object to that, so I'll do it -- but feel free to say something if that's wrong.
Moving the town to its own article makes the most sense of all. Ortolan88
italics
To clarify the debate over style markup (I see my name was cited in a summary line earlier), my only interest is in consistency. If we all agreed that "quotation" marks and not italics should be used to call things out when used as themselves, such as for words and characters, then I would be changing them the other way. I would also think it was a bad idea, since quotes add to visual clutter in a way that italics don't, but in the end, it is the consistency that is important, not the particular markup, or my particular opinion of the markup. Ortolan88 17:18 Mar 12, 2003 (UTC)
A partial reason for quotes can be found on Æ, where æ appears in italics in the paragraph mentioning its use as a character in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The problem is that characters in the IPA are never supposed to appear in italics, so somebody someday is going to complain about this. The complaint won't be entirely valid, since we never put it in italics when using it, only when mentioning it. Still, this gives a hint of why philosophers and linguists prefer to use explicit delimiting symbols instead of font changes for this purpose.
As for consistency, like most Manual of Style matters, I favour it within an article but see enforcing it across articles as a bad idea. In this matter, we could use italics in some articles to avoid visual clutter but use quotation marks (or even the linguists' angle quotes for glyphs) in articles about alphabets where more precision is warranted.
Consistency within articles is a trivial goal. Being able to land anywhere in the wikipedia with the confidence that "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" is the song and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the album is the whole point of having a style. Similarly, always knowing that a word in italics is being used as itself, and not in a sentence, anywhere in the wikipedia is the point.
I would rather that the article said "the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", so that people would understand what was meant even if they'd never read the Manual of Style. Your example leads only to a false sense of security.
That said, if there is a better way to differentiate letters as letters <å>, <x>, and so forth, propose it on Wikipedia_talk:Manual of Style and I will probably support it. I felt some qualms when changing this markup because italics are inherently lighter than text type and have a tendency to disappear, particularly when it is just a single letter. Ortolan88 04:14 Mar 18, 2003 (UTC)
But that would require me to participate in the odious MoS in the first place! ^_^ Well, I've already done that a few times, so I'll probably go and do just that. -- Toby 04:29 Mar 18, 2003 (UTC)
I know you're not interested in style, Toby, but could you lay off the "odious" stuff? It is simply normal publishing practice, done everywhere, from newspapers to textbooks to documentation. You rely on it, whether you know it or not, I rely it, everybody does. If you don't want to do it, don't do it, others will do it for you. I gave you quite a reasonable answer on your questions and I don't think I deserved a rude answer. I have never had a single edit war over style and have gone along with most of what anyone has suggested. Ortolan88
I didn't mean to insult you with "odious", which was a joke. I guess that my smiley ("^_^") didn't work, sorry about that. No hard feelings? As for not wanting to do style, what I don't want to do is to have to use a style that doesn't fit the article in question ("have to" in the sense that copy editors will change it later if I don't) -- I don't mind that other people seek consistency in articles that they're working on. In fact, I support some style decisions (and have discussed them on the MoS, more reason for the smiley), and make some things consistent even across articles in a limited range. I just think that the whole thing has gone overboard (a matter of degree). -- Toby
On another note, I'd like to end the discussion of the physical unit after the physicist's name.
The rest isn't really relevant to any discussion of the letter.
It's quite relevant to a discussion of the unit, of course, which is why that material should be (and now is) on Angstrom.
(We might also mention Angstrom in the disambiguation block, in case somebody writes "3.2 Å" in an article somewhere featuring an atomic radius in the text. That would be a violation of style ^_^, but they might do it.)
-- Toby 04:29 Mar 18, 2003 (UTC)
transcriptions
Ruhrjung:
Was the information on Swedish that you removed (transcription as "AO") wrong, or did it just get lost in your edit?
-- Toby 11:25 19 May 2003 (UTC)
Given that Swedish isn't my mother tongue, I am prepared to learn better, but according to my present, and best, knowledge there are two matters intertangled in your question:
Was the origin of the Å-letter that of a long /a/ written as "aa" before the ligature was established in the 16th century? (In Sweden the medieval times end in the 16th ct.)
Is it today acceptable to transcribe the Å-letter in Swedish as "ao" or "aa" like it is in Danish and Norwegian.
The answer is Yes and No. ;-)
In Finnish and Swedish there exists no good or acceptable ways to transcribe the non-English characters similar to in German, Norwegian or Danish.
-- Ruhrjung 17:30 19 May 2003 (UTC)
It was Mic that first added the transcription of "Å" as "AO" (on Swedish alphabet).
I've asked him about on his talk page; but if he doesn't stand up for it, then I certainly won't.
-- Toby Bartels 02:54 20 May 2003 (UTC)
Actually I agree that there are no good or acceptable ways to transcribe the uniquely Swedish letters into English. Transliteration may be one thing, but as far as transcription goes I think the default method works best in English; stripping the diacritical marks. In texts from the 16th century the diacritics in Ä and Ö were still written as miniature "e", often tilted. Concerning the letter Å, I was quite certain that I had seen a small "o" on top. This would also be consistent with the Swedish recommended transcription "ao", which differs from the Danish and Norwegian "aa". However, I'm not that certain anymore and it could just as well have been A with a small "a" on top that later was formed into a ring.
o
a
A
or
A
?
Digging up an example of either ought to be enough. -- Mic 16:26 20 May 2003 (UTC)
The correct transcriptions are i Swedish: å => ao, ä => ae and ö =>oe. But in norwegian and Danish, å => aa. Source: Swedish Nationalencyklopedin. Den fjättrade ankan 22:56 26 May 2003 (UTC)
I thought the correct transliteration was å => aa in Swedish as well. Anyway, I have seen transliterations based on both sound similarities å => o, ä => e and ö =>o (actually, I don't think there are other letters in the Swedish alphabet sounding much like ö), and appearance similarities(just dropping the diacritics) as well, å => a, ä => a and ö =>o.
Nationalencyklopedin is not much of an authority, and if the statement above really is true, it wouldn't be the first strange prescription from that source. It's totally senseless to talk about "correct transcriptionsin Swedish". In Swedish, the only correct thing is not to transcribe. To expand the issue to transliterations instead, foreigners mostly ignor the pricks and dots anyway, think of Björn Borg (or Björk Guðmundsdóttir from Iceland to take a more recent example), and that is also what works the best when you have nothing but a foreign typewriter. To return to transcriptions, I've never seen Bjirn/Bjurn or Bjirc/Bjurc, although I believe these to be best possible transcriptions to English. Johan Magnus
I've always done it: å = au, ä = ae, ö = eu. And I would say that is how it should be translated when you do such things with words. Like german ü, why can't it be changed to y? Müller » Myller. Åström » Austreum. {sjöar}
I could easily be missing something, but I've *never* seen anyone convert å to au, or ao, and I can't think of any way that would make sense. I HAVE seen people make it aa to fit in a characterset that doesn't allow it, and there's a historical rational there, and I've transcribed it as 'oa' myself, because that's the sound of it, but I've never seen a Swede do that. Arker07:28, 27 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I can't recall ever seeing 'au' or 'ao' used that way either - it's always 'aa' or more commonly simply 'a'. Using 'au' seems particularly infelicitous since it's a not common letter sequence in Swedish (eg. in paus, automat, augusti). Orcoteuthis (talk) 00:03, 18 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
There IS a good reason to transcribe these letters into two-letter equivelants - it must be done when using an environment which does not support them, such as when using plain ASCII, a non-scandinavian typewriter, or on a computer where there is no easy way to produce the correct characters. Granted this is not a problem as often as it once was, it's still a necessity in many cases. The correct pairs are ae, oe, and aa. Arker (talk) 04:17, 2 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed. The image looks like it's produced by someone who never reads text in languages with this character, or who totally lacks sense of beauty and proportions. As an illustration it's a failure, and rather an example of misinformation. Wikipedia does better without. --Johan Magnus 16:20, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)
The above is nonsense, and Rather ill informed. The letters seem to be generated using the same font as all the other latin letter articles. Making the ring touch the upper case 'A' is normal practice in many fonts, to save vertical space. If perhaps the above two people would care to examine many fonts in detail, they would discover this. It could of courswe be argued that large letter look better with the ring not touching, but that really depends on the font design. Removing this illustration without providing a better alternative certainly borders on vandalism. Egil 16:53, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)
No, it's nothing but bad typography. One of the first things you learn students of typography is that characters have to be cut for the size they are intended for. You can not take a 7-points character and magnify it 7 times and believe it looks good as 48-points - anyone with his eyes in behold can see that. A bad illustration is of course worse than no illustration at all. /Tuomas 19:21, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)
modified ÅI know that fonts traditionally were hand drawn and designed for each size. Modern vector based fonts are not. I have modified the existing image so that the rings are removed from the body of the upper case letter 'A'. This image is typographically in line with the rest of the latin letter articles, which is also an important point. Whether Tuomas, Johan Magnus and whoever likes it or not. If anyone want to provide an improved version, then fine. Egil 11:29, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)
IMPORTANT NOTICE: There is no consensus whatsoever that the 'Å' image be
removed. If someone means that this image does not belong in Wikipedia, then do
the proper procedure and list it in ifd for deletion, because you think it is
ugly or whatever. Egil 11:29, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)
However, the Wikipedia project relies on discussion on the talk pages, and it's crucial for Wikipedia not to give in to editors who try to enforce their opinion without trying to reach consensus. Egil's modification of the picture, and information about the modification is laudable. I took the liberty to make this information even more obvious. --Ruhrjung 15:15, 2005 Jan 4 (UTC)
Pronunciation guide for Anglophones
I'm copying my discussion with User:Tuomas about the change in pronunciation guide here. The IPA and Sampa symbols can still be made more uniform, please, varsågoda...
boats and halls
Do you have any particular reasons for preferring the diphthong as an aproximation to the Scandinavian å-sound? Regards! /Tuomas 18:59, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)
(This was about my replacing hall with boat in the pronunciation guide for the Scandinavian å sound.) Tuomas, apologies for my North American bias. You must not have listened much to American English speech -- Boat has two vowels in written English but it's not a dipthong in most pronunciations, unless you want to make the case that it's [@U], (as it may well be in RP, and everything's a diphthong in RP, more or less). "Hall" on the other hand is pronounced with an /A/, not an /O/. It has different regional pronunciations but only in unusual dialects would it sound like /O/. If it were, it would sound way too much like "hole", and so that vowel would have to shift somewhere else.
Apart from maybe some welsh accents, I have never heard a monophthongal pronunciation of boat. User:PRB
To my mind, though, the possible diphthong nature of "boat" is nicely balanced by its mnemonic spelling. Not to mention that I often hear Å pronounced in Sweden as a diphthong itself -- the long version as in "så" is often pronounced [OA]. Anyway I'm open to better examples, but "hall" simply isn't right.
Shall we agree first on what sound "Å" has, and what SAMPA you believe it to be? Then we can perhaps find an English word that we agree on. Regards, Steverapaport 19:26, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Thank you for your responses! I'm currently preparing for exams (in Arabic), and will not be present here at Wikipedia regularly. Furthermore, my relation to Swedish is not uncomplicated. I went to Swedish kindergarten for a year a so, a very long time ago - almost before I'd learned to speak - but my mothertounge is Finnish. However, this early experience of being surrounded by Swedish has given me a strange sort of near-native relation to the language. I'm not as aware of peculiarities as are people who have studied it from scratch. I've however been much involved in the reception of exchange students to the Lund University, and by them I've come to get some impressions of what's important (and not!) for adult students of Swedish.
But, as with all vowels of Swedish it's crucial to remember that the quality differ between so called "long" and "short" vowels — it's not at all only a difference of length, as it is in for instance Finnish. :-))
Ok so we're into differences in English dialect here. See Even IPA is pronounced differently across the Atlantic?! Simple to solve. The short one is "hall" according to Oxford, but is "cause" in American English according to [1]. By the way, this same source lists the "boat" as the example for the nearest American vowel to the /o/, the long 'å'. (Actually I made it up, but nice to see it confirmed somewhere) I think we can settle it nicely by just being explicit, something like:
The long 'å' as in "stå" is pronounced /o/ as in "boring", the short 'å' as in "hålla is pronounced /O/ as in the British "hall" or the American "home".
Further corrections? --steve
Not that I can think of. :-) /Tuomas 06:46, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)
When I read the page, I headed back here to say something like, "I don't know Swedish, but your IPA doesn't match your 'sounds like', so something's gotta give." I now see that this was already discussed at length, but I still disagree with the outcome. My objection to the use of "bored" or "boring" is not a strong one, but it seems iffy to use as your example a word that follows the vowel with an R, since this will shade the pronunciation of the /o/. (I can see the difficulty, though, since without the R you end up with the /oʊ/ diphthong.)
My larger objection is to the use of "home" as your American example of /ɔ/. I know that the /oɔɑa/ range is notoriously fluid among English dialects, but "home" is pretty stably /hoʊm/ among all the American English speakers I've heard. "Caught" is the usual example I see for /ɔ/ (although I've heard some New Englanders pronounce it with /ɑ/); "dawn" or for that matter the originally-suggested "hall" might be better. /Blahedo20:11, 15 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]
It is often a dipthong in Swedish. At least in every dialect I've been exposed to (from Stockholm north.) Så sounds like so-ah, då like doe-ah. The first syllable of åka is identical to English 'oak.' Arker07:39, 27 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, Blahedo is right. The vowel in American "home" is oʊ, not ɔ. As for how to represent in American English the vowel of RP "hall", there's not really a way everyone can agree on. Even among Americans who distinguish between words like "cot" and "caught", the quality of the latter is often more like ɒ than ɔ. Still others render the vowel of "caught" as something like oɐ (the stereotypical Brooklyner, perhaps), which is actually closer to how it seems most Swedes pronounce words like så and då.--Atemperman14:17, 1 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Greenlandic
Are you sure the letter exists in Greenlandic? The only reason I can find for it in Greenlandic is for Danish names and a few loanwords. 惑乱 分からん22:58, 2 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Origin of Å
I know it is tempting to think of the Å as an A with a small O on top of it, because the vowel is nowadays pronounced very O-like. However, I've always thought and heard that the actual origin of the Å was an A with another small A on top of it. Especially considering the alternative spelling of the Å as AA, and the earlier forms of this Å being transcribed as a long Ā.
I think no harm would be done in verifying this issue once and for all with a scientific source.
I don't think it's a scientific question, but a historical one, but anyway of course you are right. It's a ligature of aa. First they wrote aa, then a with a very small a on top of the first one, in a liguature. Then the tiny little a was minimised until it became nothing but a circle. A review of old documents would show this easily, as would simply checking the nordic language wikipedia articles. SvenskaDanskNynorsk and Bokmal all agree on this. Arker07:50, 27 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I have a reliable source written by a Swedish linguist, and you needn't go farther than Project Runeberg to verify it for yourself. According to Gertrud Pettersson, Å was not used until the 16th century, and a quick glance at a scanned page of a book printed in 1536[2] shows clearly that there are no As with small As over them. If you think about it, it's pretty illogical to assume the O is a warped A, since the O is there to hint at the similarity to [o], just like with the E over A and O that eventually became Ä and Ö. Next time, please consult reliable sources instead of relying on other Wikipedia articles when encountering these kinds of situations.
I've never seen å used for 'att' in Swedish, formal or not. That's distinctly Norwegian. Å is used in informal written Swedish, not as a substitute for 'att' ('to' - which an English speaker, but not a Scandinavian native - would call an infinitive marker) but rather for 'och' (and.)
It seems to have gone from the article now, anyway "att" is often pronounced as a "short å" in Swedish, but it would either look very uneducated, or possibly be used in a way to show a speech pattern (such as accent, slang or dialect) more phonetically to really write it that way. Some people have suggested that since "att" is often confusing for younger speakers, it's a word they expect will die out relatively soon. 惑乱 分からん14:30, 13 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]
It is for me quite dialectal/very informal (but *not* Norwegian-ish) to use 'å' for 'att'. It certainly googles; I tried [3] and finds both occurances of "å köra" = "och köra" and "å köra" = "att köra" (such as "Sen är det bara å köra"). Btw, I learned back in school (in Sweden!) that "att" in Swedish is called "infinitivmärke", which google also supports me in... [4] seems to be a sketch for some kind of thesis about use of auxiliary verbs in Swedish, mentioning "infinitivmärke" a number of times). \Mike(z)12:03, 25 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I just want to point out in this old discussion that att in Swedish is not one word but two (with different histories). One is the infinitive mark, the other one is a conjunction corresponding to "that" in for example "I know that you saw me" (Jag vet att du såg mig). It is only the ininitive mark att that may be pronounced as å, and so it often is. Pronunciation of the infinitive mark as [at] (the formal pronunciation of both att words) is quite rare, I would say. However, most people are not aware of att being two words since none of them is more than a grammatical element. Therefore when they write many people use och with infinitives instead of att since och has the same informal pronunciation as infinitive mark att. It makes more sense to people that och is pronounced [o] than that att sometimes is, since the former contains the [o] vowel also in its "full" pronunciation ([ok]).
That's interesting. I also learned the interpretation I am using in school, in Sweden (specifically Uppsala University.) I was most confused, at first, by the way it is used; for instance that the infinitive form of drive in English is 'to drive' but in Swedish the infinitiv was simply 'köra' not 'att köra.' Every source I can find agrees, btw, that the infinitiv form is indeed 'köra' not 'att köra.' After discussion with several teachers, and research, I came to the conclusion that infinitive (originally a latin term of course) was adopted with different meanings in English and Swedish - in latin the infinitive would be the basic form of the verb, which others derive from (the meaning used in Swedish) but it also would be the form of the verb that translates to English as a two word phrase using 'to' or in Swedish using 'att' (the meaning it was given in English.) In Romance languages those two definitions both point to the same form of a verb, but in Germanic languages it does not, you have to pick one or the other.
Calling 'att' infinitivmärk seems inconsistent with calling a basic one word form infinitiv, but I've learned that Swedes don't seem to care near as much about linguistic consistency as English speakers, so it's believable, though it's odd I dont remember it ever being called that in my coursework. Arker02:30, 17 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Isn't drive still an infinitive verb, only that since it's also a present tense verb in in 1st/2nd sing and plur tense, the "to" is added as clarification? Hope you get what I mean... 惑乱 分からん15:28, 9 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
As already noted, "infinitive" means the basic form of a Latin verb. In the 19th century, grammarians attempted to describe all Indo-European languages as though they are dialects of Latin. This works with some difficulty in Romance languages, but in Germanic languages it's a real mess. I was taught that an English infinitive always includes the "preposition" "to". It's more like a verbal auxiliary ("helping verb") or adverb than preposition, but that's how it was taught. Nowadays it's called infinitive marker, but that wasn't used when I was young.
But Germanic languages have two of what Latin calls infinitive; the form with to/zu/att/å and the form without. I know "to" is used in English somewhat more than "zu" is in German (I don't know any Swedish) but the parallels are the strong. The "zu" is so tightly bound to the verb in German that it interposes itself between a separable prefix and the verb, yet "infinitive" means the form without the "zu". In English infinitive is the form with "to", but in the sentence "I must be crazy", if "be" isn't an infinitive, what is it? I've seen it called the positive, but "am" and "are" are positives. ("Is" could be called the positive, except that it's called singular.) The reality is that English has an infinitive with "to" and another infinitive without, and the grammarians need to invent some nomenclature.
This is actually one of my pet peeves. The "to" only obfuscates grammatical discussion. I remember in 2nd grade having two different teachers repeat the mantra "a form of the verb 2B" time after time. One day we had a substitute who said "a form of the verb 'be'", and that mantra now made sense. — Randall Bart23:13, 9 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Swedish grammar is largely relatively similar to English and German, and comparing the sentence "I must be crazy" to the equivalents in Swedish "Jag måste vara galen" and German "Ich muss verruckt sein" (I think), I'd say the word "be" would be an infinitive (following an auxiliary verb) in all three languages. The "to" argument strikes me as weird. What would modern grammarians claim? 惑乱 分からん01:58, 10 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Also, I'm not an expert on Romance languages, but I think the marker "a" often works as a similar infinitve marker in them, like in Spanish "tengo a ir", (I have to go) etc. Not as common, though. 惑乱 分からん01:58, 10 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I am no expert on any language but English, though vor länger, länger Zeit studiert ich Deutsch. My comment on Romance languages was only that applying Latin grammar to analysis of the language was a better fit. In German, infinitives end with "en", and that can be labeled an infinitive marker, though I would call "en" the conjugation. The best way to put it is that "to", "zu", "att", etc are infinitive markers, but the infinitive does not need one.
I think the English confusion arises from the loss of inflection. In German I say "ich sehe", but the citation form is the infinitive "sehen". In English I say "I see" and the infinitive is "see" and the lemma is "see", but to make it clear that the citation form is the citation form, we use "to see".
I'm disagreeing with [[Lemma (linguistics)]], which says "lemma" and "citation form" are synonymous. A "lemma" is the word you look up in a dictionary. Find me an English dictionary with all the verbs listed under "T", and I'll reconsider. — Randall Bart16:37, 10 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Hmmm, just a few things:
Your German sounds strange, do you mean: "A long, long time ago, I studied German" or "For a long, long time I have studied German". (Sorry, it's "studierte", though.)
I lost the "e" on "studierte", but otherwise I'm pretty sure of my German here. From 1970 to 1973 I studied German. "Vor" means "ago", not "for", and "ago" is weird, so the teacher went over this one many times. English "For three years, 35 years ago" is in German "Drei Jahre, vor 35 jahre".
Everything ye'v been teached is wrong. The verbs in English were corrupted to their subjunctive tenses. see: indicative; to see: prospective; sean: infinitive. -lysdexia 02:29, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
What is wrong with the wikipedia "Å"
It does not look normal. Sometimes you can not see the circle, and there is no space between the A and the circle. --Arigato116:46, 2 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The article states that Å in Danish (my native tongue) is pronounced as ɔ (or ɔ:) (as in RP 'hall'). That's not entirely true though, because Å can also be pronounced as ʌ and as a long ɒ:, as well as a sound that is perhaps a bit hard to explain, but it is quite like in American 'cold' (oʊ) (as the article describes concerning the pronounciation in Norwegian and Swedish), but it's only the first part of the diphtong, without the ʊ-sound. I have, actually, a handout on the Danish sound system (from a university lecture on the pronounciation of classical Greek, but that fact shouldn't matter) that supports this and from which I have borrowed some of the technical details explained above.--Nikolaj Christensen20:00, 14 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The picture of a bank office belonging to the Bank of Åland strikes me as not being particularly illustrative of this article. For one thing, the logotype is barely visible, and there's nothing really special about the "å" in there. Please motivate the inclusion of the picture properly. It seems more lika a way to promote the article about the bank than an improvement of this article.
, the second is X-SAMPA /O/, IPA: 
. International Phonetic Alphabet for English proposes caught for the second sound. And my Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English proposes /h
