On 9/1/2011 11:45 AM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
typewriter). Dutch does have one native use of the umlaut (though it
has a different name, I forget which, maybe trema :-),
You remember correctly. According to
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Trema_%28diacritic%29
'trema' (Greek 'hole') is the generic name of the double-dot vowel
diacritic. It was originally used for 'diaerhesis' (Greek, 'taking
apart') when it shows "that a vowel letter is not part of a digraph or
diphthong". (Note that 'ae' in diaerhesis *is* a digraph ;-). Germans
later used it to indicate umlaut, 'changed sound'.
when there are
two consecutive vowels that would normally be read as a special sound
(diphthong?). E.g. in "koe" (cow) the oe is two letters (not a single
letter formed of two distict shapes!) that mean a special sound
(roughly KOO). But in a word like "coëxistentie" (coexistence) the o
and e do not form the oe-sound, and to emphasize this to Dutch readers
(who believe their spelling is very logical :-), the official spelling
puts the umlaut on the e. This is definitely thought of as a separate
mark added to the e; ë is not a new letter.
So the above is trema-diaerhesis. "Dutch, French, and Spanish make
regular use of the diaeresis." English uses such as 'coöperate' have
become rare or archaic, perhaps because we cannot type them. Too bad,
since people sometimes use '-' to serve the same purpose.
--
Terry Jan Reedy
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