> The umlaut symbol originated in German but has been borrowed into other languages, including Swedish
Actually, no. In Swedish, Ä is not an A with an umlaut, Ä is a distinct letter of the Swedish alphabet. Swedish has nine vowels: AOUÅEIYÄÖ, unlike German, which has five vowels: AEIOU, and three umlauts: ÄÖÜ.
The evolution of it in Swedish comes from Æ -> Aͤ -> Ä, while in neighbouring Denmark and Norway, they kept both Æ and Ø. All three languages also have Å, which comes from AA.
Super-mega-pedantry edit:
Okay, the article says Swedish borrowed the umlaut symbol, and this is actually true. In the 1500's when printing presses were becoming common, Swedish printers imported them from Germany, the German ones didn't have Æ types, but they did have Ä types, and the Swedish printers essentially went "ah, fuck it, can't be arsed", and started using Ä and Ö.
...while the Danish printers also imported the presses from Germany, but said "fuck you, we're making our own types" and kept using Æ and Ø.
Swedish has 18 monophthongs, Standard German has 14, RP English has 13, so although there's some correlation between the number of vowel letters in a language and the amount of vowel sounds, different languages solve the problem differently.
And in the case of English, horribly. English orthography is objectively crap, where vowels represent multiple vowel sounds depending on context and the history of each word to a ridiculous degree.
If anything, there's a dialectal glide from Ä to E in some places, so we think those two vowels have way more in common than Ä and A.
If you write E instead of A in a word, we can read it, but you look like a small child who hasn't learned proper spelling yet.
If you write Ä instead of A in a word, we're confused, and you look like a foreigner who's learning Swedish and is still confused about the extra vowels.
Same in German.
They're characters that represent vowel sounds, sure.
It's kinda the same thing as how in the English alphabet, Y is by definition a consonant, despite being used to represent a vowel sound in many words. (beauty, many, cyst, tryst, for example)
The thing that helped me limit this practice more than anything else was a comment from Nelson Beebe that whenever he saw coördinate in something I had written, he mentally pronounced it as if he were channeling¹ Peter Sellars’s Inspector Clouseau.
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1. The New Yorker style guide would call for this to be spelled “channelling.” The diaeresis is not the only idiosyncrasy of that publication’s style.
Wait, really? I thought that was a British versus American English thing.
It never confuses me though, despite being able to read German as well. The mind just shifts to whichever language you're reading and interprets any diacritics accordingly. English just doesn't seem to fall under the 'those are umlauts' category of languages for me.
English spelling is bad enough overall but words like that don’t even come up on my radar in that context.
You know what a really good editorial stance would be? Simplify the dang French words. How am I supposed to spell beurocracy? Why can’t it just be “byurocracy”? Please lead the charge on this one NY.
Not everybody does know that, especially not non-native speakers, which English obviously has in abundance.
Dieresis is not really the best symbol for this given that it's much more commonly used for completely different things in other languages, but at the very least it makes you stop and consider why it's there in an unfamiliar word, and perhaps check its pronunciation in a dictionary.
(The more sensible thing would be to use the apostrophe as syllable separator where necessary, as in na'ive, co'operation etc - it is already frequently used this way in English in foreign names anyway, and is much more intuitive for non-native speakers.)
Especially when one comes from a language where ö is a completely different letter than o.
If you see "reemerge", a fraction of your brain is wasted trying to think whether it should really be "remerge", but "reëmerge" clarifies itself immediately. And "coop" vs "coöp" is outright ambiguous however you try it.
The acute accent is probably more important - it forces a pronunciation change of the vowels, disambiguating "to resume" from "a résumé". Unfortunately there remain many heterophones without a standard accent placement ("minute" is horrible).
The grave accent is rarely needed outside of poetry; the only word I'm aware of that requires it is "learnèd" (adjective meaning "knowledgeable").
And maybe perhaps the pronunciation of diaeresis would be clearer written diaëresis?
Wouldn't diëresis be more correct? Now I'm curious how the New Yorker writes it.
It's just clear that someone thought deeply about a system that follows consistent rules. You don't often see that with writing these days.
https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite-themes/-/blob/main/b...
When typing prose into my novel, if I use any of the words listed in the replacement text (McGenius, McNester, etc.), they get replaced with the C macron.
That's a very American English example. In Britain, you can’t drive[1] far without seeing a Citroën.
[1] generic verb for "proceed along a road"; personally I do it on a bike
