ADS-L/NTY synergy

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:14 AM -0500 4/24/01, Mark Odegard wrote:
>>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.

The AHD4 entry maintains the distinction I mention above:  umlaut for
fronted vowels, di(a)eresis for separately pronounced vowels.  In
French, only the latter occurs and it's a "diarèse" or something of
the sort.  There's evidently a newer sense, not yet in AHD4 or the
OED, shared by Mark with Bill Safire, in which an umlaut is any
diacritic consisting of two dots over a vowel, whatever its
significance.  Me, I think I'll pull out my old prescriptivist garb
and start a "Save the Diaeresis" groundswell.  It's a fine old term
for the anti-diphthongization device, dating back to a cite from
1611, and I object to its anschluss by "umlaut".

larry