How do my esteemed fellow forum members feel about the fact that when HM Queen Margrethe returns to Marselisborg at Easter, the city surrounding it, known as Århus the last time HM visited, will have renamed itself Aarhus, for the sake of keyboard-challenged foreigners who allegedly couldn't be bothered to write Århus when googling business and vacation opportunities and/or were ever so confused as to whether Århus, Aarhus and the typo Arhus were different cities?
(Granted, the city was called Aarhus untill 1948, when the letter combination aa (originally a long /a:/ or ah sound, but in modern times the sound /o:/, as in English "raw") was replaced with the originally Swedish letter å. (The ring represents a small superscript a, just like the dots in ö and ü represent a small superscript Gothic e.)
Originally the name Árhús means "house by the stream", from the genitive case of á, aa or modern Danish å, stream (cognate with French eau and with the same pronunciation) and hus, house. Both Aarhus and Århus are pronounced : [ˈ ɒː huː ːˀs], simplified /'o:r'hu:s/ or in English orthography somewhat like Awr-hoos.
Just appropriate in a modern English-dominated globalized world, unpatriotic catering to foreign sensibilities or a sad loss of something that makes Denmark Danish?
The theme also extends into the naming of the new royal twins. Fat chance they will be called Jørgen, Søren, Jørgine or Hjørdis....
