Umlauts, Diaereses, and the New Yorker (2020)
40 comments
·January 27, 2025dhosek
As an undergrad, thanks to the fact that I could easily do diacritics with TeX, I was overfond of using the diaeresis (I had gleaned from observation, not just in the New Yorker but also the writings of Donald Knuth, that a diaeresis served to distinguish two vowels that were pronounced separately which might otherwise form a diphthong).
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.
CalRobert
But how do I tell you to get eggs from the coöp without confusion?
JumpCrisscross
> New Yorker style guide would call for this to be spelled “channelling.”
Wait, really? I thought that was a British versus American English thing.
wongarsu
On a, u and o diaresis just replace one ambiguity (is it coord-inate or co-or-di-nate) with another (is coördinate supposed to be co-ordinate or co-ördinate with ö pronounced as ö instead of o). On e and i that ambiguity doesn't exist. So I find myself sometimes writing naïve or noël, but never coördinate.
Freak_NL
'Coördinate' and the likes make perfect sense to anyone who started out with a language such as Dutch or French where this is common. It's rather refreshing to see it used in English, where usually even the humble 'resumé' must beg for its accent aigu.
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.
wongarsu
It certainly helps that there are very few words in English that use umlauts, and even fewer where an umlaut following a vowel could happen. I guess theoretically you could form the word Astroübermensch (who knows, maybe that's what Musk will call it when he selects the best people to send to Mars). Then it would be ambiguous whether you mean the übermensch spelling and pronunciation or the more common ubermensch. But that's a stretch
null
CalRobert
In Dutch I appreciate the diaresis in zeeën and the like. Can’t think of an English example though.
maxdamantus
Maybe "cooëeïng", though I don't think I've seen that written with diaereses (probably not a very common word, but it's a nice example of a long vowel letter sequence, and one that people from NZ/Australia should understand).
seszett
Naïf... if you can call that English.
thangalin
Another fun diacritic is the macron. The Mc in McCormick replaces Mac, and can use the COMBINING MACRON BELOW (◌̱c). I couldn't get it working in ConTeXt, so wrote my own:
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.
henrikschroder
Ha, I get to do an ackshually!
> 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.
int_19h
While we're in the spirit of ackshually, German has more than five vowels - that is why it needs the umlaut to actually represent all those vowels with the five base letters!
henrikschroder
There are many ways of representing vowel sounds, umlauts is one way of doing that, but it's just one way of many.
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.
int_19h
Umlauts are one of the more consistent schemes at least, and generalizes decently well if you treat it as the indication that vowel is being centralized (i.e. applying it to "e" and "i" should yield unrounded central or back vowels - which is indeed the case in some languages; e.g. "ë" in Albanian is basically the schwa). If you map it to the frequency-based 2D vowel chart, you get something like this:
i ü ï u
e ö ë o
ä a
Most other systems are very haphazard largely because all of this stuff evolved as scribal abbreviations. (So did umlauts, of course; it just happens to be the lucky case where it ended up mostly consistent.)
lalaithion
The German umlaut also comes from small e superscripts over A, O, and U, so while the sentence is technically wrong I do think it’s fair to identify the Swedish Ä and German Ä as the same, conceptually.
henrikschroder
Yes, both the Swedish Ä and the German A-umlaut came from the desire to have more vowels in the language and wanting to write AE in a more compact way, but no-one in Sweden thinks of Ä as "some kind of A". They're not related, there's no vowel-shifting going on, no case where words that used to be written and pronounced with an A are now written or pronounced with an Ä. There's no actual umlauting going on.
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.
kps
> The evolution of it in Swedish comes from Æ -> Aͤ -> Ä
Same in German.
lxgr
Why would you say that Ä, Ö, and Ü are not vowels in German? Intuitively that doesn't seem true, but I'm not sure if linguists maybe use the terminology differently.
henrikschroder
Because they're not letters of the German alphabet, by definition, and they're not German vowels, by definition.
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)
int_19h
By which definition is "Y" a consonant? It represents the vowel sound much more often than it does the consonant sound, so if you go by that metric, it's a "vowel letter".
Of course, the more accurate take is that it's by definition neither a vowel nor a consonant because those are properties of sounds. They only apply to letters to the extent that letters consistently represent sounds, but when they do not, it doesn't make any sense to categorize letters like that.
Symbiote
There's no official definition of Y being a vowel. In many words it is, in some it isn't.
lalaithion
English isn’t set by a standards body; it’s designed by all of our little choices. And I think English is enhanced by the noble diaeresis, and diminished without it, so I will continue to write reëlect, reëvaluate, and coöperate.
And maybe perhaps the pronunciation of diaeresis would be clearer written diaëresis?
jplrssn
> 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.
ahazred8ta
I kind of wish we used a raised small dot: coׁordinate (smaller than an apostrophe)
keybored
I was on board with the fanciness of this editorial stance for a while. But after I recently learned what diaereses are for I think, what’s the point? You know how cooperate is pronounced. You know that being naive is not being a knave.
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.
int_19h
> I think, what’s the point? You know how cooperate is pronounced. You know that being naive is not being a knave.
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.)
yencabulator
As a non-native speaker, coöperate does NOT help, it makes it harder to recognizes otherwise familiar words.
Especially when one comes from a language where ö is a completely different letter than o.
int_19h
I'm not a fan of dieresis for this specifically because it's too confusing due to its frequent use for other things in other languages. But there are other ways to indicate it.
o11c
The problem is that even when you do know the words, there can still be ambiguities. Especially given how frequent outright typos are these days (being exposed to typos significantly lowers your reading comprehension for well-written text).
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").
euroderf
and blessèd
o11c
The accent isn't actually critical there, since it means the same either way. It's just that it's so common in poetry that even in prose for any particular word it sounds funny to swap the pronunciation out.
Since the usual rule for poetry is to forbid long syllables next to each other and the stress is always on the "bles", we normally pronounce it "blest" before syllables that start with stress and "blessèd" before unstressed syllables. But "blessèd" can occur before unstressed syllables in tunes that include LSSL (the only examples I can find off the top of my head are "blessèd redeemer" and "blessèd are those/they/we" (huh, that's a really weird meter: LXSLSSLSXS/LSXSLSL times 4, except that the last is /LSLSXSLSL), and in both cases there are probably more hymns with "blest" before the words).
LSSL is often because of trochaic substitution (usually at the start of a line) or anapestic substitution (common anywhere, but the leading L means it can't be the start of the line here). Pure anapests (easy, but iambs are just so easy to reach for) or some kind of use of dactyl (not too hard, but even trochee is uncommon in the first place) are also viable. Other theoretical ways to construct LSSL are very rare in English (amphibrach sequences are common in some analyses, but I prefer to treat them as iamb + anapests + lone short, or even lone short + dactyles + trochee, because when speaking we strongly prefer to keep short syllables together).
Doctor_Fegg
> It mostly appears in French borrowings like naïveté
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
nijuashi
Or, you know, adopt phonetic alphabet like the Japanese and the Koreans. That may stop all the nonsense with arbitrary pronunciation (it won’t).
I enjoy the way that the New Yorker's style guide enforces consistency and precision in a way that is often lacking in English. Not just the diareses, but also the way they consistently follow the rule that when you add "ing" to a word that ends in a short vowel, you double the final consonant to make it clear that it is a short vowel. So the gerund of "bus" is "bussing", not the commonly used "busing", the latter of which looks like it ought to rhyme with "abusing".
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.