yxans-delar Axe eye Source: Parts of the axe - Gränsfors Bruk gransforsbruk.com/en/axe-knowledge/parts-of-the-axe

I used Google Image to examine some English alphabet posters and it seemed like almost all of them used umbrella or unicorn for U, but none of them used a U-Boat. Similarly, I found several Swedish alphabet posters with ubåt for U, although uggla (owl) was more common. I can also confirm that yxa was very common for Y.

@jkej Thank you profusely for the reverse image search link. It's really helped make headway into this mystery. And for your comments on U-boats and unicorns. Would you mind telling me how you reverse-image searched it? I had tried doing the straight reverse image search for OP's photograph, and even a cropping of just the Y part, but found nothing. What's your secret?

@DanBron I didn't use reverse image search. I simply did an ordinary image search for "alphabet ball" and scrolled down until I found the right picture. Pure luck I guess. Your updated detective work based on this clue is very impressive though. Seems like there might be only a few pieces of the puzzle missing to make the connection.

@jkej The sad thing is I think this is the end of the line. The ball was designed in the late 90s at the latest. And it was manufactured in Asia, probably China. The designer, whoever s/he was, is likely retired by now. And the company went Chapter 11 in 2004, and after that and all the restructuring & leadership changes in it, I don't even know who is email to track the designer down, or if I did, whether anyone has company records from the 90s. My last hope was the product number on Fishpond, but because we slashdotted them, they took the page down, and I didn't write the # down before then.

@HWalters OP confirmed it's exactly the same ball: @jkej that's exactly the ball I/my son have/has!. I would not have spent the time researching its origins and creators that I did otherwise. Obviously the catalog thumbnail and OP's photo are taken from different angles of different regions.

@DanBron The discepancy in layout cannot be accounted for by different regions alone. K and E are shared designs between the two images. The neighborhood around K and E are very different, however; in the OP image K and E are adjacent and at each others' "9 o'clok" (E being oriented differently); Q is at K's 6, and Y at K's 7. In the catalog K and E aren't even adjacent; we can see E's entire neighborhood (from 1 to 12: BMDGHL), and K's neighborhood that can be seen is JIDA. So at the very least, if they're the same ball, K and E are repeated, which makes little sense.

I don't think your research lacks value; the designs are clearly the same. I'm also not implying anything in particular, except that it's suspect that the OP's ball is exactly the ballbouncesport catalog number G: 54-4155 ball, unless the catalog display ball itself was a pre-release model that was redesigned (or if the model number somehow includes alternate layout designs, which would again be odd).

@HWalters Oh, thank you for elaborating in such detail! I see what you mean now. You are correct, of course. You have a good eye, I wish I'd checked more closely myself. Maybe it's a knock-off ball made in the same pattern? But in any case, the trail has gone cold from this point. I'm not sure what other leads I can pursue to make material progress. It's really too bad the Hedstrom lead didn't work out. It was promising, and took a couple hours of research to reach a conclusion.

It's not just that the lay-out is different; look at which part of the letter E is covered by the elephant's ear; that's different too.

@HWalters, you're correct, my ball is not exactly the same as in the picture, but the overall design seems to be. The letters are positioned differently, but the images are basically the same. The only diffferences I can tell is that Dog on my ball is black and white and not brown and white. The House on the picture has some greens details, which my does not have. Everything else seems to be the same. Would it help if I added more pictures of the ball?

See the new comment about how the would-be nail might be a tack, and how a tack is a nubb in Swedish.

@DanBron I'm also skeptical of nubb, but for other reasons. I actually think the picture is a fairly reminiscent of a nubb, but I don't think it's likely that this word+picture would have been selected to represent the letter N. If you look at the other word-picture combinations they are all very common words that children may be expected to learn at an early age and the word is generally the most obvious association to the picture. nubb doesn't fit that description and there are probably hundreds of Swedish words beginning with N that would have been better choices in that regard.

On the other hand, yxa and ubåt are very good choices in this regard. They are words that practically all children learn at an early age, they are easy to illustrate and recognize, and there are no other words you may reasonably mistake the pictures for. There are also relatively few words starting with U or Y so there are few other good choices. This is why I found many other examples of yxa and ubåt being used to illustrate Y and U.

It's also from this perspective that I think the yxa theory is the most convincing. The other words suggested only work when you think "backwards". Sure, if you have the letter Y and a picture of an axe, yankee axe, yaxe, yellow or yuè may seem like the best solution. But a designer would have had the freedom to choose both word and picture, and in that light I don't think any of those words make any sense.

@jkej That's my thinking too. Plus all the other words are too complex to expect toddlers to already know, and if they don't already know the words, the words serve no pedagogical purpose. If you can't recognize a worm from the picture, then you will have no sound to associate the letter w with. The only thing that bugs me is why are only two of the words sensible in Swedish? How did those two errors get made, and everything else is clearly English, and mostly nonsensical in Swedish?

@DanBron Yes, how the mix-up happened is the big question mark in this theory. Although I would point out that there are more than two words that are sensible in Swedish: Björn, Giraff, Hus, Is, Jet(flygplan), Känguru, Lejon, Mus, Regnbåge, Snigel, Tiger, Ubåt, Vulkan, Xylofon, Yxa, Zebra. What you meant is probably that there are only two words that are not sensible in English, and there are 9 words that are not sensible in Swedish. A Swedish ball would also have included the letters Å, Ä and Ö, and possibly omitted W.

@HWalters I have added a caveat to the answer that OP's ball is not identical to the catalog picture, quoting the discrepancies both you and m69 found. Thank you for your keen eye!

"The only thing that bugs me is why are only two of the words sensible in Swedish?" I'm not sure why it has to be a Swedish ball; it could simply be a Swedish English ball

@Dan Bron concerning footnote 6: shortly before you published "A final fingerprint" Google directed me to the same Pinterest.se page without me having searched for anything "Swedish". Consecutive searches however brought me to the same page under Pinterest.com with titles in Dutch (language of the country where I live) and Pinterset.de with German titles. The page itself always in English. Mysterious ways...

@DanBron One (hopefully) last comment from me: The answer gives the impression that yxa only refers to one specific type of axe: hatchet. But yxa really is the equivalent to axe/ax; a generic term for all types of axes (tools, weapons, one-handed, two-handed). There are of course other words for different type of axes (most of them compound words ending with yxa) but most people (including toddlers learning the alphabet) would refer to all of them as just yxa. The specific term closest in meaning to hatchet is probably handyxa.

@jkej Thank you. Yes, I discovered the same in my research for this answer. You can even see that the Beskow painting is a little hatchet, whereas the ax in the ubåt poster is a double-headed battle-axe. But at this point I am leery of making further edits to the answer; I think I have fatigued my fellow EL&U regulars with constant bumps of this fascinating Q to the front page. But I want to extend to you, especially, my gratitude. Your comments provided much helpful feedback and rich lines of inquiry. If answers on SE had an "acknowledgements" section, you'd be first on the list. Thank you!

@Dan Bron: I found the item number: 54-4246T. ;-) You can check it with Google's Webcache (plus a bit of hacking). Just use the former product's url as query and click the triangel and then In Cache. You then have to remove the parameters of URL (by deleting everything after the +) and voila, there it is. But you have to hurry up a bit as Google will flush the cache when it realises that fishpond forwarded/deleted the original page). Maybe, you can archive it (via screenshot) for everyone.

For those lazy people like me, just use the link: webcache.googleusercontent.com/… ;-)

@biolauri Thank you!!! I tried google cache (you can see some of my references are to the google cache, I use it all the time), and Wayback, and found nothing. I didn't think to remove the parameters! That's a great general tip. Super useful. Thank you. I may have to edit this question once more, now. Argh.

Before the info's lost... the cached web page has multiple references to what it calls the barcode: 0033149041559. BC search confirms this is a valid barcode owned by Hedstrom.

Just one more thing, if I may be so bold: someone has been tampering with evidence and nobody noticed! In the double picture with two elephants the letters E are upside down, which is inconsistent with footnote 3. Even worse: the elephant's trunks are not pointing in the same direction as the ones in the original photographs. How could this have happened under the watchful eye of Dan Bron and associates?

@HWalters Page source analysis, amazing! Thank you! I put that in as well. That number exactly matches the (previously mysterious) codes given in the catalog. The barcode breaks into 0 033149 04155 9, where 033149 represents BBS and 04155 is the specific item number. See additional info in footnote 5. And Draakhound: that was because both elephants are upside down in the original photos, so while I flipped horizontally, I forgot to also flip vertically. Fixed now, thank you.

Yay! He's back :))) I've been wondering whether the ball in gmauch's question is a Chinese copy of the original Swedish one. In which case, aren't designs subject to copyright laws? Is there a way of knowing if the "original" illustration is protected? If it is, it would then be possible to see the original. N'est pas? euipo.europa.eu/ohimportal/en/designs-in-the-european-union and here is the link to the search availability euipo.europa.eu/ohimportal/en/rcd-search-availability Have fun!

according to this PDF file the item is #10 Decorated Playballs - Shipped Deflated: the item number is 54-41554; UPC is 0-33149-04155-9 and it was produced in 2013 (I think)

@Mari-LouA Nice find! That's the 2013 catalog, meaning the ball was available to purchase in 2013. We know it was produced earlier because it also shows up in the 2012 catalog, and there some items are marked "new", but that item isn't. So it predates 2012. How did you find that catalog, and where? Might be a source I can use to track down add'l info.

@Mari-LouA Wonderful. You've got your very own footnote! And you were right about the comments. Good thing I took screenshots yesterday. Especially of the guy who said that when he first started reading my answer he thought "yxa" was farfetched and clearly wrong, but by the end he was convinced it had to be correct.

No, I think the bumping of the Q plus your mention of the too long comments prompted the mods to take action. It's ok, I expected it, as you did. The comments were too long. My ego doesn't get to trump that.

@Mari-LouA It's been really fun. Imagine how much we learned about an obscure child's toy all without leaving our chairs. BTW, Hedstrom has a very deep history and is well known among the "collectibles" subculture. This rabbit hole goes much, much deeper.

@DanBron Thank you for your kind words and for all the time and energy you have devoted to this magnificent answer. I'm glad I could make some small contributions to it. But now I feel a little guilty that my last comment may have contributed to your recent relapse after having stayed clean for almost 24 hours. ;)

@Joseph I'm terminally completionist, but I'm not magic. Check the revision history; the first version of this answer was posted four and a half days ago. There's been (as of this comment) 30 revisions since then.

My original comment was deleted by some officious person (or moved to chat with a lot of other comments, or something) but I shall insist on reminding all members here that I was the first one to call this a brilliant answer! -- it has become even more brilliant now and the readers have duly acclaimed it with 259 upvotes already, but its real value cannot be measured by 800+ reputation points accumulated over 4 days -- this is the type of answer that reflects the passion and attention that many members bring here (and what makes ELU great), so I sincerely appreciate Dan Bron's masterpiece.

@Mari-LouA Yes, definitely possible. Though I don't really know how to investigate it. If it's a knock-off, we're really out of luck. If I want to pursue this further, I'll have to start at one of the two ends: email Hedstrom (I found their contact form) or ask OP to supply the name/address/etc of the shop where he bought the ball, and I can ask them where they sourced it, and follow the stream from there. BTW, you've caught the bug, haven't you? You have yxa-itis!

Different company, but still Chinese: kaihongwenti.com/… but now I want to see what image they use to represent the letter Y. (I already had the yxa bug, but didn't come up with anything solid!) Curiously, "jellyfish" and "insect" seem to be quite popular.

@Mari-LouA Your chasing down of that price sheet was quite a find! You out-Googled me and all the other commentors on that; I had tried googling the UPCs and "A-Z phonics" etc and come up dry. You have definitely found "solid" things! And now you see what drove me to continuously edit this question. Also, it led me to report a bug in the iOS app (which can't handle its weight, apparently). Two-fer!

I spy with my little eye a "yak" on first image, top right hand side! evershiningtoys.en.alibaba.com/product/763510921-213369317/… There are two phonics play balls on this page, scroll down. The description is: "PVC Full Printed Ball" which I guess cover multicolored or colourful.

This is quite the most extraordinary stack exchange answer that I've ever seen.

@Mari-LouA and Dan Brown I think I would be just one more repeating that this is the most complete and amazing answer in whole Stack Exchange Network but I feel compelled to do so. Sorry if that sounds repetitive. If I can help in any way I'll do so. I'll start by answering where I bought this ball and it is in a store called Lojas França located in a Mall called Bourbon Shopping Wallig. Here is the URL: bourbonshopping.com.br/lojas/bourbon-wallig/França

Found pinterest.com/pin/431219733041038600 and pinterest.de/pin/431219733041038600 pinterest pages (from archive.fo/gWxqT). Both pages show catalog ball image; both report they were pinned from Toys "R" Us.

@HWalters You might be interested in this comment by Draakhound. And yes, in my research too all Pinterest pages sources back to Toys R Us. I've found they're one of Hedstrom's marquee clients. But they no longer offer this particular ball. Maybe it's been discontinued.

@HWalters and Dan Bron, as per Mari-Lou A's request, I added a picture of the (dark side of the ball) air valve where the letters DNE can be seen. That seems to be the only thing that is not alphabet related. I can't find any other symbol or sign of the manufacturer. I hop this helps you detective guys!

@gmauch That's not a Dog; It's clearly a Dalmatian, or in Swedish: Dalmatiner. Another mystery solved! ;)

@DanBron do you already have an ELU tee? This post brought me and so many others an incredible amount of joy, the least I can do is try to improve your wardrobe. Email me at jay@... so I can get your details?

@Jaydles Oh man, that would be awesome. Nope, never earned any swag before. This is like a cherry on top of a delicious Swedish cake. This question has been a blast. I'll email you.

@DanBron Did you notice that the Hedstrom ball also has Vase instead of Volcano and Robot instead of Rainbow? I wonder if they have the U-boat. Maybe you could ask them to take pictures of all sides of their ball?

@jkej I did notice the vase, I mentioned it but it's buried in this now-beast of a post. Good idea about Uboat!! But now my real hope is on the toy retailer responding to me on Facebook. If they don't, I may ask OP to send the same message but in Portuguese.

@DanBron Yes, I see it now. I agree that getting an answer from the toy retailer would be your best hope. But I still think it would add to the "circumstantial" evidence if we could find out the full set of pictures/words used on the original Hedstrom ball. Particularly, it would be very interesting if we could confirm that: 1) All words that are not sensible in English (i.e. Yxa and U-boat) were absent from the original. 2) All words not sensible in Swedish were present on the original. If 2) holds it is possible that all words added to the knock-off were taken from a Swedish source.

@jkej Good point. I'll ask.

@DanBron Your next clue, this item is listed on alibaba, manufacturer is Shanghai Jianhuiling Sporting Goods Co., Ltd. Courtesy of an HN reader: alibaba.com/product-detail/Alphabets-print-ball_573748097.ht‌​ml

@BradKoch Dude, that is 100% the ball. I'm going to have to figure out how that HN guy tracked it down. That's amazing!!!

@DanBron Given the pictures of the original that we already have, we only need to confirm that Owl, Queen and Worm were on the original to prove 2). I'd like to underscore that I think the answer from Hedstrom was a BIG step forward. It may seem like a dead end, but it conclusively tells us that A) the pictures on the ball came from two distinctly separate sources, B) the general impression of an English ball can be fully explained by one of the sources, C) the pictures from the second source are better explained in Swedish. These were things we could only speculate about before.

@jkej I'll ask Hedstrom to send me either a listing of all the letters, or more pictures of the ball. Did you notice a HackerNews sleuth found the actual ball? Now I'm going to have to work across language barriers. Maybe if I buy some balls they'll be more open to conversation.

@JeffAtwood This is the most incredible community-driven effort to ever hit the Stack Exchange. Can we show this awesome work some love and put it on the spotlight for everyone to see how awesome the SE Community can be?

Congratulations, the official Stack Overflow twitter just tweeted about this question: twitter.com/StackOverflow/status/880835962363756545

@DanBron Amazing! All the pieces are falling into place now. The only thing bothering me now is that the "random Chingrish mistake" explanation is still somewhat plausible.

@jkej I do think it was a mistake by a Chinese manufacturer. What I'm trying to pin down is why this mistake exactly. The pairing of Y and axe in both the mistake and in Swedish can't be accidental, especially given your u-boat discovery. The mistake was somehow mixing in Swedish, I'm sure of it.

I'd hate to be a spoilsport, but I did find four examples of "U is for U-boat" just now (didn't think of looking for it sooner) 1 2 3 4

@Draakhond Great research! Off the bat, #4 explicitly says they use unusual words to "stretch their young readers' vocabularies", like "Q for Quagga". #3 seems credible but potentially dated (like WWII dated, but needs to be confirmed). I worry about the reliability/quality of the first two links, but that also needs to be investigated. Thank you very much!

@jkej Hedstrom answered. I've updated the answer. The circumstantial evidence is complete. Both (1) and (2) are now proven.

This layout is a much better match. But where is "DNE" between A, F, C, and D?

@HWalters I think the DNE is a stamp applied after production. Maybe by an exporter or other middleman. I do not think it is applied by the manufacturer.

@DanBron A few comments behind you mentioned about asking me to write in Portuguese to the retailer shop. If you wish I'd go personally to the shop and ask the owner! Just let me know exactly what to ask, after all this question is more yours than mine!

@gmauch Bring the ball, explain the mystery, and ask him for as many details about where he got it as he will give you! Producer, UCP or other codes, addresses of supplier, time he bought it, etc. Also see if he knows what DNE signifies. Basically give him the 5th degree ;) And no, this is definitively your question. We would not be having this discussion if you had not posted this fascinating mystery.

Dan, dan are you still awake? I found the same exact letter Y with the same identical ax superimposed but at a different angle. Do you want the link? I guess you do... This means of course that it invalidates your Swedish Yxa theory. Unless... they stole it from a Swedish clipart website. Could be...

nipic.com/show/14226249.html complete with all its "wibbly river-like handle glory. Would not have found this image w/o @thedrake

@Mari-LouA Fantastic! So now we have a pretty solid explanation of how the ball happened. But in a way we are back at square one in trying to figure out why the letter Y was paired with a picture of an axe.

@Mari-LouA The Y picture you found seem to be part of a longer series. See: this, this and this. For some letters there are several pictures. Many of them make sense in English, but some don't. There is a U-boat there. There are also a few more that make more sense in Swedish than in English.

See: Blomma, Katt, Orm.

Also Ö, and Öga if we assume that the diacritics have been dropped.

And also Jojo of course. We also have the Vulcano/Vulkan and the U-boat/Ubåt, but I can't find Rainbow/Regnbåge. This is obviously not the complete series though.

@Mari-LouA What a find! The hunt continues! Now we know it's a "thing" to associate Y and axe in Chinese clipart. A consistent thing. It wasn't a random act of Chinglish, it's deliberate and consistent.

There are also some indications that there's a Spanish alphabet mixed in there: Jamón, Llave, Naranja, Ojo, Queso and Uvas.

@jkej Ok, you are really on to something now. They are doing Swedish. Or some Scandinavian language. I really wonder why!

@jkej Oh!!! They are just making clipart which imitates children's books in any Western language they find. They're just copying European primers! Including Swedish. Just so they can sell more merchandise. Ok, and our DNE guy just came across the Y/axe one. The fact hay he found Y/axe and not N/naranja may just be blind luck. But either way, the primer the clipart maker was copying mean Y to mean yxa. So, after all that, the theory was right. (If the clipart guy is imitating European primers.)

@Mari-LouA Based on your finding of that clip art (from thedrake's finding of the ball and then the axe), check out jkej's research. In particular, ö, island, is a dead giveaway. The guy who crates the clipart which was used on the knock-off ball found a Swedish children's primer. He may not have Venezuelan been aware it was Swedish. But either way, the smoking gun has been found. We know, for sure, that the clipart set has been adulterated with Swedish words, hence, through a long road, OP's Y is yxa. We're done!!!

@DanBron Yes, I think the case for yxa just became VERY strong again. I wouldn't be so sure that this website is the direct source from which the ball designer copied, or that this user was the one who did the original work. But someone has clearly copied primers from different European languages in a consistent style and mixed them together. This was an accident just waiting to happen.

@jkej At this point, especially with your ö, I'm satisfied. When I'm back in front of a computer, I'll make a few more edits, but then I'm going to close the case. This won't be the last comment from me, but I do still want to take the opportunity to thank you, very much, again. You've done so much work and found so many leads and evidence. And of course Mari-Lou, and thedrake, and HWalters, and so many others.

@DanBron I'm not sure ö is such a strong case really. The diacritics are missing and the word for island in many slavic languages seem to begin with O. On the other hand, I think orm is a very strong case for Swedish. Among the links to other languages from the Wikipedia page for Snake, there's only Swedish, Norwegian (only Nynorsk, not Bokmål), and Armenian (but they use a different script) using a word startiing with O.

@jkej You really blow me away. Checking for other languages where island starts with an O was going to be my last bit of research (that and finding corresponding children's primers as evidence). Now I don't have to do even that. I'll use örm instead, and use that to motivate both Swedis, and diacritic-dropped, meaning without introducing additional assumptions, ö*/*island can be adduced as evidence as well.

@DanBron Great! But there shouldn't be any diacritics on orm. It really begins with O, not Ö.

@jkej I'm going to add a section on tracking down first the axe, and then the y-axe pairing, which I'll attribute completely to thedrake & Mari-Lou, then another section on following that lead to look at other letters and build a case that other languages, are mixed in, with a strong case for Swedish. I'll attribute this latter section completely to you. The new, conclusive sections won't be my work, they'll be drake+ML's work and your work, respectively, just presented in my answer.

I present you with the page that has FOUR different O's. I haven't read all the comments, so maybe someone has beat me to it. This morning I was working, so no time to post or dawdle. cliparts101.com/search/cartoon+O one of the languages (number 1) must be Spanish because "eye" is ojo, and drum roll....Y1 and Y2 cliparts101.com/search/cartoon+Y

@DanBron That sounds like a good plan. I have to say that this investigation has really been an amazing display of cooperation. Each time one person has made a breakthrough and pursued it as far as they could, someone else has been able to pick up the torch and carry it a little further. It's also entirely possible that none of us ever left their house during the whole thing. ;D I could see this story being turned into a best-selling detective novel.

@jkej Yes, absolutely. I was telling thedrake last night that for the reasons you list, and others, this has felt like the quintessential Internet experience. The raison d'etre of the web. Something never before experience-able. Amazing.

@Mari-LouA I'm afraid jkej scooped you on that find, this time around!

Yep, I looked through the comments after I posted. But the website is different. There must be four versions of phonics. I'm off to have my afternoon nap, so very sleepy. Ciao :)

Combing @Mari-LouA 's new website tip with the old one it may now be possible to reconstruct an almost full Swedish alphabet: Apelsin, Blomma, Clown, Delfin, Elefant, (No Swedish F found), Giraff, Hammare

@jkej I think we have to find words-letter pairs which are Swedish and exclude English. Like dolphin and elephant aren't evidence for or against either language. But despite English blooms, I think blomma is positive evidence for Swedish and against English, like your original u-boat is.

Isglass, Jojo, Katt, Lejon, Monster, (No Swedish N found), Orm, Papegoja, (No Swedish Q found), (No Swedish R found), Sjölejon

Tiger, Ubåt, Vulkan, Xylofon, Yxa, Zebra, possibly Åsna, (No Swedish Ä found), possibly ö.

@DanBron I agree that Swedish words that work only in Swedish is the best form of evidence (did you see that I found Apelsin?). But finding a full Swedish alphabet, even with some words that also work in English, would still count for something in my book. Someone could have been making these pictures to use for several languages, but only bothered to make different pictures when they felt it was necessary.

Here's another site that has all the letters in one picture. There are no new pictures in this one though. This one was uploaded 2010-04-27, the pictures on clipart101.com were uploaded 2011-12-30 and the pictures on nipic.com were uploaded 2016-02-25. @DanBron Do we have any indication when the knock-off was first made? According to Alibaba, the company making the knock-off was founded in 2003.

I just noticed that JohnPage had found thedrake's axe picture on nipic.com. This picture was uploaded 2008-03-11, so it predates all the Y-pictures using the same axe that we have found so far.

@jkej Who is JohnPage? Also I haven't forgotten about this post, I'm away the log weekend and having a hard time finding time in front of the computer.

@DanBron A user who posted a new answer 6 hours ago. It's at the bottom. No problem. I didn't mean to put any pressure on you. I simply have a hard time letting go of this. I can't stop thinking about how I might be able to find earlier and more complete sets of the clipart pictures. ;)

I couldn't find much more information aside from that. There is a phone number linked to the aforementioned "Smash Palace Mac" computer which apparently used to run a bulletin board system back in the 90s. The phone entry claims it is located in Houston, Texas. I highly doubt however the phone is still relevant though (nor would I expect any inquiries about a 20 years old clipart to be welcome). It also is quite possible this all is just a coincidence in their names.

Ah, actually a user posted this reply on the corel draw forums which had the same signature as the original clipart files. I consider it to be a possibility that person may have some kind of relation to the clipart in question but, again, it may be just some sort of a coincidence, albeit an unlikely one.

@undercat That's amazing research. I'll add it to my answer (currently in edit to include Mari-Lou, jkej, and JohnPage's additional research).

it's not dead, maybe I linked it wrong. try again

I just did, works noe

thank you

(I'm amazed at how many people got sucked into this mystery)

What can I say, mysteries are fun! Anyway you clearly have provided a sufficient proof that they just used a clipart image. Since Baidu's image search (which is the most popular search engine in China) sports that clipart of Y on the very first page, it seems fully convincing the creators of the toy just picked literally the first clipart for Y that the search engine gave them.

@undercat Extremely interesting! The name "Crtn. Double Dot O-island" seems to verify that the picture is indeed meant to illustrate the letter Ö. In my mind this removes the last shred of doubt that these pictures, or the pictures they were inspired by, were intended to illustrate the English, Spanish and Swedish alphabets.

I assume that by "This makes it seem the creators' original name was English and not Swedish" you mean that the person who created this particular eps file in 1995 gave it an English name. Surely, whoever chose to couple a picture of an island with the letter Ö must have understood Swedish.

Do you think that you could post a link to where you found the original eps files? I would like to look this up for myself.

Also to back my theory they used Baidu and clicked on the first(okay, second) image they saw: imgur.com/a/DIt29