umlaut

[Mark A. Mandel]

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> writes:

>>>>>
At 12:22 AM -0500 4/26/01, Mark Odegard wrote:

     [...]

>As Mark Mandel says, its unlikely that the latter two terms are
>going to be understood by the average speaker.

But the average speaker doesn't necessarily call the two dots over
the second of two vowels in a non-diphthong (coöperation, reënter) an
umlaut, and I see no reason to encourage them to do so.  I'd rather
call them two dots over a letter.  Of course I care more about how we
think of them than what we call them--we pronounce "505" 'five oh
five', but we know the 0 is "really" a zero, not an o, so maybe I
should accept that people call a diaeresis an umlaut but know it's
not "really" an umlaut...
<<<<<

So what do you propose by way of encouraging or not encouraging? When
you're talking to a non-linguist and you need to spell a word containing a
[horizontal-double-dot-over], will you say "R E E-with-two-dots N T E R"?

For me, the needs of communication and maintaining relationships (read: not
coming across as a pedantic pain-in-the-whatever) weigh heavy in the
scales. I'll probably stick with "umlaut" most of the time.


-- Mark