Difference between umlaut and dieresis?
garys...@gmail.com
umlaut and a dieresis? I've looked at the dictionary but it says very
similar things for each of the words, so I'm having a bit of trouble
understanding. I would really be thankful to anybody who could explain
this to me. :)
R H Draney
A dieresis is a symbol consisting of a pair of dots placed above a letter...an
umlaut is the effect of this marking on the pronunciation of that letter....r
--
What good is being an executive if you never get to execute anyone?
James Silverton
> garys...@gmail.com filted:
>>
>> Greetings, could somebody please tell me the difference
>> between an umlaut and a dieresis? I've looked at the
>> dictionary but it says very similar things for each of the
>> words, so I'm having a bit of trouble understanding. I would
>> really be thankful to anybody who could explain this to me.
>> :)
> A dieresis is a symbol consisting of a pair of dots placed
> above a letter...an umlaut is the effect of this marking on
> the pronunciation of that letter....r
Possibly, I remember verbalizing ä, Ö etc. as "a umlaut", "O
umlaut" when I was learning German (not that I ever claim to
have mastered the language.) I think the actual German
pronunciations of the letters would be "ay" and "ooh" but that
led to confusion. Quite often when writing German, I used the
spelling I think of as Swiss, "ae" and "oe" etc. I very seldom
find any need for the diaerisis in English. It is not customary
here to use it in, say, "coöperate" (or is it the other way
round?)
--
James Silverton
Potomac, Maryland
E-mail, with obvious alterations:
not.jim.silverton.at.verizon.not
R H Draney
The "change of sound" occurs in other languages too...the capital of Albania is
"Tiranë", in which the final vowel is close to that in the English word "jaw";
without the umlaut, it would be closer to that in English "set"....
I have yet to discover what the letter N would sound like under similar
modification, but David St Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel undoubtedly have some
idea....r
Christian Weisgerber
> Greetings, could somebody please tell me the difference between an
> umlaut and a dieresis?
These go back to German and Greek, respectively.
In German, the umlaut diacritic is added to vowel characters to
indicate that the vowel is fronted/raised, e.g. [a] -> [E].
Originally, this was marked with an 'e' written above the vowel.
Over time this 'e' was reduced to a pair of strokes.
In Greek, the diaeresis or trema signifies that two adjacent vowels
are pronounced separately. The marking for this is a pair of dots
above the second vowel.
Modern typefaces and computer character sets have conflated these
two different diacritics. They are now usually both represented
by a pair of dots, and computer character sets provide only a single
encoding for both of them.
For greater detail, see the Wikipedia article "Umlaut (diacritic)".
--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber na...@mips.inka.de
Reinhold (Rey) Aman
As I posted on April 9, 2008:
An _umlaut_ is not the same as a _diaeresis_ (or _trema_); they look
alike but serve different purposes:
*umlaut*: a mark ( ¨ ) used over a vowel to change its sound.
The changed letter (ä, ö, ü) is also called "umlaut." Used in German,
Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, etc.
*diaeresis* (also called *trema*): a mark ( ¨ ) placed over the
second of two adjacent vowels to indicate that two separate sounds are
to be pronounced. Used in English, Spanish, French, Dutch, etc.
For much more info and many examples, see, e.g.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umlaut_%28diacritic%29
~~~ Reinhold (Rey) Aman ~~~
http://www.sonic.net/maledicta/Chelsea-T-shirt.jpg <-- for Tootsie
Chuck Riggs
They look much the same, but they have a different purpose. If your
dictionary says similar things about them and no more, I suggest you
consult a better dictionary. The AUE FAQ lists several online ones.
--
Regards,
Chuck Riggs
Near Dublin, Ireland
Hatunen
<am...@sonic.net> wrote:
>garys...@gmail.com wrote:
>
>> Greetings, could somebody please tell me the difference between an
>> umlaut and a dieresis? I've looked at the dictionary but it says very
>> similar things for each of the words, so I'm having a bit of trouble
>> understanding. I would really be thankful to anybody who could explain
>> this to me. :)
>
>As I posted on April 9, 2008:
>
>An _umlaut_ is not the same as a _diaeresis_ (or _trema_); they look
>alike but serve different purposes:
>
> *umlaut*: a mark ( ¨ ) used over a vowel to change its sound.
>The changed letter (ä, ö, ü) is also called "umlaut." Used in German,
>Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, etc.
"Umlaut" is actually the way a vowel changes in certain
situations, a process, so to speak. It is also the term used for
the mark to indicate a vowel has undergone such a change or that
is not pronounced the same as the unnmarked vowel. As to vowel
sound change, an example would be German "mann", "man", with its
plural "männer".
I don't know if "umlaut", a German word, is used for either the
process or the mark in other languages that have vowel changes,
e.g., I reckon there must be a distinct Finnish word for this
sort of thing.
--
************* DAVE HATUNEN (hat...@cox.net) *************
* Tucson Arizona, out where the cacti grow *
* My typos & mispellings are intentional copyright traps *
Don Phillipson
> >
> >Greetings, could somebody please tell me the difference between an
> >umlaut and a dieresis? I've looked at the dictionary but it says very
A diaeresis is an orthographic (writing) convention of the Greek
language. An umlaut is a writing convention of the German
language. No rule expects them to be either different or the
same: each is one of the conventions of the languages to
which they belong.
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)
J. J. Lodder
> R wrote on 13 May 2008 08:06:19 -0700:
>
> > garys...@gmail.com filted:
> >>
> >> Greetings, could somebody please tell me the difference
> >> between an umlaut and a dieresis? I've looked at the
> >> dictionary but it says very similar things for each of the
> >> words, so I'm having a bit of trouble understanding. I would
> >> really be thankful to anybody who could explain this to me.
> >> :)
>
> > A dieresis is a symbol consisting of a pair of dots placed
> > above a letter...an umlaut is the effect of this marking on
> > the pronunciation of that letter....r
>
> Possibly, I remember verbalizing ä, Ö etc. as "a umlaut", "O
> umlaut" when I was learning German (not that I ever claim to
> have mastered the language.) I think the actual German
> pronunciations of the letters would be "ay" and "ooh" but that
> led to confusion. Quite often when writing German, I used the
> spelling I think of as Swiss, "ae" and "oe" etc.
Nothing Swiss about it.
It is a standard German spelling,
and it used to be the preferred one on usenet.
(and still is in www. )
Google also finds Goethe when you ask for Göthe,
unless you ask for "Göthe"
> I very seldom
> find any need for the diaerisis in English. It is not customary
> here to use it in, say, "coöperate" (or is it the other way
> round?)
Naïve still has it, some of the time,
Jan
Adrian Bailey
news:qejj241uie37doqc0...@4ax.com...
Indeed. For example, dictionary.com does not say "similar things" about the
two words: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/umlaut
Adrian
Cece
Umlaut is what the mark is called in German. Dieresis is what the
mark is called in English.
Reinhold (Rey) Aman
Wrong.
Reinhold (Rey) Aman
> Reinhold (Rey) Aman wrote:
> > garys...@gmail.com wrote:
> >> Greetings, could somebody please tell me the difference between
> >> an umlaut and a dieresis?
[...]
> > As I posted on April 9, 2008:
> >
> > An _umlaut_ is not the same as a _diaeresis_ (or _trema_); they
> > look alike but serve different purposes:
> >
> > *umlaut*: a mark ( ¨ ) used over a vowel to change its sound.
> > The changed letter (ä, ö, ü) is also called "umlaut." Used in
> > German, Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, etc.
> "Umlaut" is actually the way a vowel changes in certain situations,
> a process, so to speak.
Instead of saying that it is "ACTUALLY ... a process," it's more
accurate to say that it is ALSO a process in certain situations. For
example, it's a process when *Frau* (woman) changes to *Fräulein* (Miss;
young lady); but there is no such process involved in the unrelated
*schon* (already) vs. *schön* (beautiful).
The causes and explanations of umlauts are complicated by *Primärumlaut*
(primary umlaut) and *Sekundärumlaut* (secondary umlaut), etymology,
morphology, etc. And in Hungarian, there are short umlauts ( ¨ ) and
long umlauts ( ´´ ) -- but that's getting too OT for AUE.
> It is also the term used for
> the mark to indicate a vowel has undergone such a change or that
> is not pronounced the same as the unnmarked vowel. As to vowel
> sound change, an example would be German "mann", "man", with its
> plural "männer".
>
> I don't know if "umlaut", a German word, is used for either the
> process or the mark in other languages that have vowel changes,
> e.g., I reckon there must be a distinct Finnish word for this
> sort of thing.
In English linguistics, the noun "umlaut" is used for the mark ( ¨ ) and
the changed letters (ä, ö, ü), and the verb "to umlaut" for the process.
Other languages have their own terms for "umlaut," such as the French
"métaphonie" and "voyelle modifiée" (modified vowel); the Spanish
"metafonía" and "modificación de la vocal radical"; the Swedish
"omljud," etc. My small Finnish dictionary doesn't show whether the
Finns imported the German "Umlaut" or have their own term (probably
something like "kääntää tulkinnänörainen"). :-)
(Christian, who knows French and linguistics very well, will probably
correct my French-related comments above.)
James Silverton
I don't recall seeing naive spelt with a dierisis in the US.
"Ae" etc. to indicate an umlaut may well be a usual German
spelling but nobody told me when I was learning the language and
the first time I recall seeing it was when I received a reply
from a Swiss travel agent in the 80s (hence, my name for it!) I
remember at the time assuming it was because they were using an
IBM typewriter. I must look carefully at a German popular
magazine like Bunte when next I am in the local library.
Incidentally, Googling away on spelling, it looks like diaeresis
(141,000) and dieresis (117,000) are not dissimilar in
popularity and diaeresis OR dieresis gets 248,000. A lot of the
hits acknowledge both spellings.
Adrian Bailey
news:fda2a770-59d0-4cc6...@b1g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...
> Umlaut is what the mark is called in German. Dieresis is what the
> mark is called in English.
Rubbish.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/umlaut
Adrian
J. J. Lodder
It's not hard to find obviously leftpondian examples
<http://guerillawomentn.blogspot.com/2008/02/obamas-nave-politics.html>
for example.
Searching on "naïve" gives over four million hits.
> "Ae" etc. to indicate an umlaut may well be a usual German
> spelling but nobody told me when I was learning the language and
> the first time I recall seeing it was when I received a reply
> from a Swiss travel agent in the 80s (hence, my name for it!) I
> remember at the time assuming it was because they were using an
> IBM typewriter.
Teleprinter trafic used 'ueber' exclusively,
since they didn't have a ü key.
Jan
jerry_f...@yahoo.com
> Hatunen wrote:
...
> > I don't know if "umlaut", a German word, is used for either the
> > process or the mark in other languages that have vowel changes,
> > e.g., I reckon there must be a distinct Finnish word for this
> > sort of thing.
>
> In English linguistics, the noun "umlaut" is used for the mark ( ¨ ) and
> the changed letters (ä, ö, ü), and the verb "to umlaut" for the process.
> Other languages have their own terms for "umlaut," such as the French
> "métaphonie" and "voyelle modifiée" (modified vowel); the Spanish
> "metafonía" and "modificación de la vocal radical"; the Swedish
> "omljud," etc. My small Finnish dictionary doesn't show whether the
> Finns imported the German "Umlaut" or have their own term (probably
> something like "kääntää tulkinnänörainen"). :-)
Time for the same Wikipedia trick--click the Finnish link from the
English article. The mark seems to be "treema" or "umlaut"; the
phenomenon seems to be "umlaut".
--
Jerry Friedman
jerry_f...@yahoo.com
...
> I have yet to discover what the letter N would sound like under similar
> modification, but David St Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel undoubtedly have some
> idea....r
"'The *heavy metal umlaut*, or "*rock dots*", is an umlaut over
letters in the name of a heavy metal band, such as Mötley Crüe or
Motörhead. The use of umlauts and other diacritics with a blackletter
style typeface is a form of foreign branding intended to give a band's
logo a Teutonic quality. It is a form of marketing that evokes
stereotypes of boldness and strength commonly attributed to peoples
such as the Vikings; author Reebee Garofalo has attributed its use to
a desire for a "Gothic horror" feel.[1] The heavy metal umlaut is
never referred to by the term /diaeresis/ in this usage, nor is it
generally intended to affect the pronunciation of the band's name.
"Heavy umlauts have been parodied in film and fiction. In the
mockumentary film /This Is Spin̈al Tap/ (spelled with an umlaut over
the /n/), fictional rocker David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) says,
"It's like a pair of eyes. You're looking at the umlaut, and it's
looking at you." In 2002, /Spin/ magazine referred to the heavy metal
umlaut as "the diacritical mark of the beast."
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_metal_umlaut>
--
Jerry Friedman
R H Draney
>
>Incidentally, Googling away on spelling, it looks like diaeresis
>(141,000) and dieresis (117,000) are not dissimilar in
>popularity and diaeresis OR dieresis gets 248,000. A lot of the
>hits acknowledge both spellings.
I get the same number of hits for "diaeresis" that I get for "diæresis" with the
ligature...this can't be just a Google substitution quirk; almost three million
(over ten percent) of the hits for "mcrae" disappear when I run the last two
letters together....r
jerry_f...@yahoo.com
<jerry_fried...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On May 13, 10:22 am, R H Draney <dadoc...@spamcop.net> wrote:
> ...
>
> > I have yet to discover what the letter N would sound like under similar
> > modification, but David St Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel undoubtedly have some
> > idea....r
> "Heavy umlauts have been parodied in film and fiction. In the
> mockumentary film /This Is Spin̈al Tap/ (spelled with anumlautover
> the /n/), fictional rocker David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) says,
> "It's like a pair of eyes. You're looking at the umlaut, and it's
> looking at you." In 2002, /Spin/ magazine referred to the heavy metal umlaut as "the diacritical mark of the beast."
>
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_metal_umlaut>
Indefatigable (as mayonnaise) in the search for truth as long it
doesn't take me farther than Wikipedia, I have discovered that in
Jacaltec and in one way of writing Malagasy, the final sound of "sing"
is spelled with an n-umlaut. I won't speculate on which language had
more influence on St. Hubbins, but I expect you to pronounce the name
of the band /'spaIN@l t&p/ from now on. Or /du'l&li t&p/.
--
Jerry Friedman
mb
...
> "Ae" etc. to indicate an umlaut may well be a usual German
> spelling but nobody told me when I was learning the language and
> the first time I recall seeing it was when I received a reply
> from a Swiss travel agent in the 80s (hence, my name for it!) I
> remember at the time assuming it was because they were using an
> IBM typewriter. I must look carefully at a German popular
> magazine like Bunte when next I am in the local library.
As far as I know, the use of e to make an Umlaut is entirely kosher in
Western Switzerland for writing German (you can even say it is
preferred with capitals), while in Germany itself it is more like a
last resort -when you don't have the right keyboard, when you have to
write in ASCII, etc. Will be hard to find it in Bunte.
Athel Cornish-Bowden
> James Silverton <not.jim....@verizon.not> wrote:
>
>> R wrote on 13 May 2008 08:06:19 -0700:
[... ]
>> Quite often when writing German, I used the
>> spelling I think of as Swiss, "ae" and "oe" etc.
>
> Nothing Swiss about it.
> It is a standard German spelling,
In a (historical) sense it is one and the same spelling, because the
two dots originally represented a small letter e written above the a, o
or u. I think in traditional German handwriting the letter e looked
like an English-style handwritten u and so did the symbol written to
show umlaut.
It's the same with the tilde used in Spanish to distinguish ñ from n,
which started life as a little n written above another n.
> and it used to be the preferred one on usenet.
> (and still is in www. )
> Google also finds Goethe when you ask for Göthe,
> unless you ask for "Göthe"
Googling for Goethe -Göthe yields 976000 hits, whereas Göthe -Goethe
yields 526000, a lot more than I'd have guessed[1] for the latter.
however, a lot of the hits for Göthe -Goethe are actually for Gothe:
Googling for Göthe -Goethe -Gothe yields 172000, but none of those on
the first page refer to the Goethe that everyone has heard of.
For some personal names the owner insists on one or the other. I knew a
Saenger once who was quite definitely not a Sänger.
[1]I wrote "I'd of guessed", but fortunately I proofread before
posting. It just goes to show that even people who know perfectly well
what the right form is can put the wrong one sometimes.
--
athel
Fred Springer
[...]
>
> Googling for Goethe -Göthe yields 976000 hits, whereas Göthe -Goethe
> yields 526000, a lot more than I'd have guessed[1] for the latter.
>
> [1]I wrote "I'd of guessed", but fortunately I proofread before posting.
> It just goes to show that even people who know perfectly well what the
> right form is can put the wrong one sometimes.
>
I'm so glad you confessed to that, because I could hardly believe my
ears the other day when I heard myself saying the same thing. It was
definitely "of" not "'ve".
Clearly the barbarian isn't just at the gate, he's already in the citadel.
Chuck Riggs
No.
Hatunen
Which setnence are you disagreeing with?
Snidely
> James Silverton <not.jim.silver...@verizon.not> wrote:
> > J. wrote on Tue, 13 May 2008 20:51:36 +0200:
>
> > >> R wrote on 13 May 2008 08:06:19 -0700:
>
Go back to an old enough palimpset, and you can see the little 'e'
written above the other vowel -- usually in one of the black letter
hands.
As happens with spoken language, "people getting lazy" (or needing to
speed things up) is a factor in the evolution to dots.
/dps
Chuck Riggs
>On Wed, 14 May 2008 14:36:28 +0100, Chuck Riggs
><chr...@eircom.net> wrote:
>
>>On Tue, 13 May 2008 12:37:57 -0700 (PDT), Cece
>><ceceliaa...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>>On May 13, 8:01 am, garysimo...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>> Greetings, could somebody please tell me the difference between an
>>>> umlaut and a dieresis? I've looked at the dictionary but it says very
>>>> similar things for each of the words, so I'm having a bit of trouble
>>>> understanding. I would really be thankful to anybody who could explain
>>>> this to me. :)
>>>
>>>Umlaut is what the mark is called in German. Dieresis is what the
>>>mark is called in English.
>>
>>No.
>
>Which setnence are you disagreeing with?
Neither. My point was that there is no connection between the two,
other than in appearance.
J. J. Lodder
James Silverton
"Necessity is the mother of invention" perhaps, but it might
better be "laziness is the mother....."
R H Draney
>
> J. wrote on Thu, 15 May 2008 23:44:27 +0200:
>
>>> On May 13, 2:56 pm, nos...@de-ster.demon.nl (J. J. Lodder)
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>> As happens with spoken language, "people getting lazy" (or
>>> needing to speed things up) is a factor in the evolution to
>>> dots.
>
>> And perhaps also the needs of typography,
>
>"Necessity is the mother of invention" perhaps, but it might
>better be "laziness is the mother....."
Laziness is the au pair of invention....r
Garrett Wollman
is responding to Dave Hatunen who was responding to Chuck Riggs who
was responding, I think, to Cecelia Armstrong:]
>>>>Umlaut is what the mark is called in German. Dieresis is what the
>>>>mark is called in English.
>>>No.
>>Which setnence are you disagreeing with?
>Neither. My point was that there is no connection between the two,
>other than in appearance.
That's a distinction without a difference, and not one widely observed
in English as she is writ.
Or put another way, Chuck seems to be conflating the phonological
phenomenon with the typography. Writing typographically -- as Cece
was clearly doing when she wrote "the mark" above, there is one
symbol, which happens to go by two names. The fact that one of those
two names is also the name of a German phonological phenomenon is not
relevant.
An equally true statement which does address the phenomenon would be:
: Umlaut is a vowel shift that occurs in modern German (among other
: languages) when words having certain shapes are inflected. The
: phenomenon used to exist in English, but is no longer productive,
: although it is still reflected in fossilized spellings of some
: irregular verbs and in incompletely assimilated borrowings from
: German (for a minority of writers). Modern English orthography does
: use dieresis to indicate that consecutive vowels are pronounced
: separately, at least in theory, but in practice it is rarely seen
: outside of a few French loan-words (for a minority of writers) and
: the pages of /The New Yorker/.
-GAWollman
--
Garrett A. Wollman | The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are
wol...@csail.mit.edu| nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry
Opinions not those | grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape
of MIT or CSAIL. | our history. - S.J. Gould, Ten Thousand Acts of Kindness
J. J. Lodder
> J. wrote on Thu, 15 May 2008 23:44:27 +0200:
>
> >> On May 13, 2:56 pm, nos...@de-ster.demon.nl (J. J. Lodder)
> >> wrote:
> >>>
> >> As happens with spoken language, "people getting lazy" (or
> >> needing to speed things up) is a factor in the evolution to
> >> dots.
>
> > And perhaps also the needs of typography,
>
> "Necessity is the mother of invention" perhaps, but it might
> better be "laziness is the mother....."
A good inventor cannot be lazy enough,
Jan