ADS-L/NTY synergy, "umlaut"

[A. Maberry]

I think the same is true for Turkish as for Finnish. The dieresis doesn't
indicate any *change* in the pronunciation of a letter but merely
indicates a that the letter is a front pronunciation. Western Turkish has
strict vowel harmony (exc. in loanwords) and has the back front pairs:
a-e, undotted i-i, o-"o, u-"u. In modern Turkish orthography the choice of
the two dots above a letter to indicate the front pronunciation of o and u
might have been historically influenced by the German umlaut, but I can't
say for certain.

allen
maberry at u.washington.edu

 On Tue, 24 Apr 2001, Jan Ivarsson TransEdit wrote:

> French has "diérèse" for pronouncing a bi-vowel as two syllables (as in the verb "plier"). This does not necessitate a "tréma" (from Greek "holes" or "dots on a dice"), the two dots that you put over the vowels "e", "i" or "u" to indicate that the preceding vowel should be pronounced as a separate sound, "romaïque" against the normal rule, as in "romain".
> The same goes for many other European languages.
> The "Umlaut" ("re-sound") is something different. The two dots here
  represent an "e" that has been moved up by the mediaeval scribes. In
  German, you can write "Goebbels" or "Göbbels" (he himself changed his
  spelling in his signature!) - the pronunciation rests the same. This is
  the "real" Umlaut: "Buch", "Bücher".
> But languages like Finnish or Swedish use this sign also just to indicate
  the pronunciation: "väst" (waistcoat) never has had an "a" - it is
  borrowed from the French "veste" and thus pronounced. In those
  languages, "ä" and "ö" today are perceived as letters totally distinct from "a" and "o" (not to speak of the Swedish "a" with a little circle on top, pronounced very close to "o").