I always thought it was Och Aye

http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=1403400

OK ... I get it!

Very interesting. In Sweden we used to write it like this: O Kay
It's not a name, just the way we pronounce it. Before OK was popular, we used All Right, found in a number of popular American movies, but spoken with a distingt local Swedish accent.

how would 'alright' be stated with a svedish twist ?

please ?

I ask merely because I'm a part descendant of Norwegians etc and I'm sure in another life we would have met

Well... where I come from we use a dialect that in some ways are similar to scottich. Especially the R. So it would be something like this: oll rait and the o is hard and both vowels have eaqual stress and the L is in the front of the mouth, just behind the teeth. ai is a difthong like aye.

got it

thanks

my poor pathetic family was thrown out, ran off, kicked off a small island off the west coast of Scotland

I'd stand and fight if I were there !

but that was nearly 180 years ago, so it's my 20th century thinking here .. but in my family we still remember ..

more norwegian I think, or is Sigurd one of your names ?
we tend to call our children after long dead family members and my grandmother used a strange mixture of Scottish and , I think, Norwegian when she was stressed

I don't really know now, wish I could talk to these old people again, like my great grandfather Hraki Knorr, called Jack in Australia of course,

When the old people die, we loose part of our history. There have been some attempts in collecting samples of old dialects here in the south of Sweden (Scania). Different areas have their own words and pronounciations. Some dialects are wider spread than others. Scania used to belong to Denmark so part of our vocabulary is Danish. Tracing words and so on is difficult in scandinavia because we have always been very close. Norway belonged to Sweden once, and at one time to Denmark. It all goes back to the old vikings, and they were around in Scotland and Britain as well. Some words have been going back and forth between scandinavian and english a couple of times.

Names are mostly the same in Scandinavia with some small changes, and changes in popularity.

I'm named after a danish grand-aunt, my aunt who only lived for 6 months and hade a danish name, and a local scanian name. Three names :)

3 names !

other people have to make do with only 2 :D

Well, some families give their children three names. My father have three names, so I think that's why me and my brother and sister have three each. If I had any children, I would give them three names too. Something from my side, somthing from my hubbys side, and something I just like. :)

Hrmm, OK then :stickout

I've always pronounced it as "o kay".

"In what was apparently a satirical article about bad spelling it stood for “Oll Korrect”. " - I have heard this before; I think it might have been in the newspaper (the Daily Telegraph here in Sydney has a daily "question" column where people ask the origin of something and others respond).

As for names, I enjoy having three "Shaun Wayne Ewing" - "Wayne" is my fathers name :D

--Shaun

but that's only 2 names .. no cheating, OK ?

My middle/second name is Jytte. That's a name I've only come across in Denmark, and it doesn't seem to be that common either. I had a friend at teachers college who was called Ytte though. But that's the only one. :)