On Sat, 15 Jul 2017 22:30:03 +0200, Philippe Verdy wrote:
>
> As well the feminine form of the common adjective "ambigu" has been
> "regularized" to place the diaeresis ("tréma" in French) on the pronounced u
> rather than an on the mute e added for the regular feminine "ambigüe": it
> also correctly forces the pronunciation of this u, which would otherwise be
> mute too as an "u" after a "g" is often there only to avoid to read it as a
> "j" (like in "exergue", "digue" and many terms ending in "-gue(s)" where only
> the final /g/ is pronounced). Not writing this tréma anywhere would be false.
> The tradition placed the diaereis on the mute e but it was not clear that it
> meant pronoucing the "u" before as a vowel.
>
> For terms like "ambigüité" it is also more natural to place it on the "u" (to
> break the normal "gu" digram which is consonnantal only and have some
> vocal rendering of the "u" vowel, even if here it would be pronounced more
> like a short but clearly spelled half-vowel sliding to the next "i", as in
> "huile" or "lui", but still not like a /w/ as in "oui" /wi/: normal French
> never pronounces an isolated "u" as /u/ like in English, except where it
> occurs in
> the French digram "ou" /u/ which is itself never like an English diphtong;
> the standard French "u" is pronounced like the German /y/ written as the
> digram "ue" or as "ü" with its umlaut... which is not a diareasis
> phonetically; French transforms this "u" /y/ into a gliding semivowel where
> it
> immediately precedes another non-mute and non-nasal vowel; but French
> ortography has no specific letter for this semivowel which remains written
> "u", or "ü" only where it has to be detached to avoid prononcing it as with
> normal digrams composed with it)
Indeed, following the basic grammatical meaning of the diaeresis as the
“resolution of a diphthong into two syllables” (Liddell&Scott), one might
wonder
whether the tréma should be placed on the first vowel or on the second vowel.
On 'oe' it stays the old way: "Tronoën", "Citroën". Since Iʼve been kindly
informed off-list that this point of the reform actually “regularizes” (as you
put it) a mistake, Iʼll have to make use of the optionality of applying the new
rules, and reset the words in my files to the old spelling. As you know, I
disagree with that way of designing standards.
> 2017-07-15 2:32 GMT+02:00 Marcel Schneider via Unicode :
>
> > On Fri, 7 Jul 2017 16:14:04 +0100 (BST), William_J_G Overington via Unicode
> > wrote:
> > >
> > […]
> > >
> > > For example, it mentioned the u diaeresis used in French, though I
> > > learned later that words that have a u diaeresis in French are rather
> > > rare.
> > >
> > Today, words containing 'u diaeresis' have become more frequent in French,
> > since last fall (2016) a reformed orthography designed as soon
> > as in 1990 [1] has become valid (though it is not mandatory [2]). Among the
> > novelties, it specifies that words like "to disambiguate" have
> > the diaeresis shifted from the last 'i' of «désambiguïser» to the 'u' of
> > «désambigüiser».
> >
> > Kind regards,
> >
> > Marcel
> >
> > [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforms_of_French_orthography#Tr.C3.A9ma
> > [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforms_of_French_orthography#cite_note-6
> >
