ADS-L/NTY synergy

[Mark Odegard]

>From: Laurence Horn
>
>LEFTFIELD
>
>(3)  Not really connected with any current or past threads, but I
>thought it might be worth mentioning that William Safire, in his "On
>Language" column (p. 26 of the Magazine), reveals that he doesn't
>know his umlaut from his diaeresis. He describes the umlaut as an
>indication that a vowel is to be fronted (correct, of course) and
>that it "also separates the sound of a vowel form the
>different-sounding vowel that follows, as in reënter."  That's with
>two dots over the second "e", in case it didn't survive the software
>conversion, but the latter diacritic, according to all that's holy,
>is no umlaut, even though it looks like one--it's a di(a)eresis.  I'm
>a bit surprised--this is just the sort of trivial piece of
>grammatical arcana I'd have expected Safire to know.
>
>larry


Only a few of us know what 'umlaut' means in English (or, even, so I am
told, even in German--by the Germans!): foot, feet, goose, geese, and how it
has nothing to do with how English irregularly formed its plural way back
when.

There is also ablaut, as with the 'strong' verb sing/sang/sung, and its
noun, song. Way back when, what became English had a form of vowel harmony
which can be compared to Modern Turkish.

"Diaeresis" represents the umlaut over the /i/ in Anaïs Nin, or the _New
Yorker_'s habit of putting an umlaut over the second o of 'cooperate'.

Yeah. In English, an 'umlaut' is the double dot over a letter, any letter.


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