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In linguistics, a diaeresis or dieresis (AE) (from Greek diairein, "to divide") is the modification of a syllable by distinctly pronouncing one of its vowels. The diacritic mark composed of two small dots ( ¨ ) placed over a vowel to indicate this modification is also called a diaeresis. (In the case of an "i", it replaces the original dot.) Broadly conceived, linguistics is the study of human language, and a linguist is someone who engages in this study. ... American English or U.S. English is the diverse form of the English language used mostly in the United States of America. ... Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using Unicode. ... A diacritical mark or accent mark is an additional mark added to a basic letter. ...

ä ë ï ö ü ÿ
Contents

Usage

In French, Greek, and Dutch, and in English borrowings from them, this is often done to indicate that the second of a pair of vowels is to be pronounced as a separate vowel rather than being treated as silent or as part of a diphthong, as in the word naïve or the names Chloë and Zoë. Welsh also uses the accent for this purpose, with the diaeresis usually indicating the stressed vowel. French also uses the diaeresis to indicate syllabification in, for example, Gaëlle and païen. It is called trema or deelteken in Dutch, tréma in French. The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... In phonetics, a diphthong ( Greek δίφθογγος, diphthongos, literally with two sounds) is a vowel combination usually involving a quick but smooth movement from one vowel to another, often interpreted by listeners as a single vowel sound or phoneme. ... Welsh redirects here, and this article describes the Welsh language. ...


The diaeresis is also occasionally used on native English words for the above purposes (as in "coöperate", "reënact", and the surname "Brontë"), but this usage has become very rare since the 1940s. The New Yorker magazine and the MIT's Technology Review can be noted as some of the few publications that spell "coöperate" with a diaeresis. Centuries: 19th century - 20th century - 21st century Decades: 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s - 1940s - 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s Years: 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 Events and trends Technology First nuclear bomb First cruise missile, the V1 flying bomb and the first ballistic missile, the... The New Yorkers first cover, which is reprinted each year on the magazines anniversary. ... Technology Review is an innovation and technology magazine affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ...


In Spanish and Portuguese, it is used over the vowel u to indicate that it is pronounced in places where that vowel would normally be silent. In particular, the u is silent in the letter combinations gue and gui, but in words such as vergüenza ("shame") or pingüino ("penguin"), the u is pronounced, forming a diphthong with the following vowel ([we] and [wi] respectively). Only Brazilian Portuguese uses the diaeresis like Spanish and when the "u" is not silent in the letter combinations "que" and "qui", in words such "cinqüenta" ("fifty") and "qüinqüênio" (a five-year period). The diaeresis doesn't exist in the Portuguese of Portugal and its other former colonies.


For instance, in Spanish, Ge would be pronounced like "Jay," Gue would be pronounced like "Gay," and Güe would be pronounced like "Goo-ay."


In Catalan, diaereses serve two different purposes. Similarly to Spanish, they are used in the groups güe, güi, qüe, and qüi to indicate that the u is in fact pronounced forming a diphthong with the following vowel ([we] and [wi] respectively). For example, aigües ("waters"), qüestió ("matter"). Also, similarly to French, diaereses are used over i or u to indicate that they do not form a diphthong with a preceding vowel. For example, veïna [b@'in@] ("neighbour", feminine), diürn [di'urn] ("diurnal"). Catalan (Català, Valencià) is a Romance language understood by as many as 12 million people in portions of Spain, France, Andorra and Italy, although the majority of active Catalan speakers are in Spain. ...


Ÿ can be used in transcribed Greek: there it represents the non-diphthong αυ (alpha upsilon), e.g. in the Persian name Artaÿctes at the very end of Herodotus. Ÿ is also rarely found in French in certain proper nouns (for instance, the name of the Parisian suburb of l'Haÿ-les-Roses). In addition, Ÿ occurs in handwritten Dutch as a glyph variant of the letter IJ. In phonetics, a diphthong ( Greek δίφθογγος, diphthongos, literally with two sounds) is a vowel combination usually involving a quick but smooth movement from one vowel to another, often interpreted by listeners as a single vowel sound or phoneme. ... Bust of Herodotus Herodotus (Greek: ΗΡΟΔΟΤΟΣ, Herodotos) was an ancient historian who lived in the 5th century BC (484 BC - c. ... The Eiffel Tower has become a symbol of Paris throughout the world. ... IJ (IJ) is a letter from the Dutch alphabet used to represent the diphthong or . ...


Similar looks, different functions

Umlaut

The same diacritic mark is used for a different purpose in German: in this language it marks a variation in the pronunciation of vowels known as umlaut. Although sometimes rendered as two vertical or oblique bars above the letter, in most typescripts it is almost indistinguishable from diaeresis — the only difference being that in well-designed typographical fonts umlaut dots will be very close to the letter's body, while diaeresis dots will be a bit farther up with a bit more of white space between the letter and the dots. In computer screen fonts the difference is usually not noticeable. Ä ä Ö ö Ü ü The term umlaut is used for two closely related notions: a special kind of vowel modification and a particular diacritic mark. ... Ä ä Ö ö Ü ü The term umlaut is used for two closely related notions: a special kind of vowel modification and a particular diacritic mark. ...


The mark evolved from the ligatures æ and œ via a small 'e' written above the letter, to small bars or dots above the letter; the umlauts can be substituted by 'ae', 'oe' and 'ue' if necessary; they should not be substituted by the bare vowels 'a', 'o', and 'u'. Æ, or æ, is a vowel and a grapheme used in the Icelandic, Danish, Faroese, Norwegian and Ossetian alphabets. ... Œ œ This page is about the ligature, not the simple combination of the letters O and E. For initialisms and the word Oe, see Oe. ...


The need to distinguish between Umlaut and Trema in Unicode has led to the following recommendation by ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 2, for use only in cases where a need to distinguish between umlaut and trema is present: In computing, Unicode is the international standard whose goal is to provide the means to encode the text of every document people want to store in computers. ...

  • To represent Trema use Combining Grapheme Joiner (CGJ, 034F) + Combining Diaeresis (0308)
  • To represent Umlaut use Combining Diaeresis (0308)

Other evolved ligatures

In Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Turkish and North Germanic languages (i.e., Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish) there are characters that appear similar to German umlauts (ü, ä, and ö), and represent sounds similar to the corresponding sounds in German. Despite this, they are in fact considered as letters in their own right, as is å. This is the reason why, unlike in German, it is not correct to replace them with 'ae' or 'oe'. The umlaut, particularly on the letter u, is also used in the transcription of languages that do not use the Roman alphabet, such as Chinese. For example, 女 (meaning female) is transcribed as . The North Germanic languages (also Scandinavian languages or Nordic languages) is a branch of the Germanic languages spoken in Scandinavia, parts of Finland and on the Faroe Islands and Iceland. ... Ä ä Ö ö Ü ü The term umlaut is used for two closely related notions: a special kind of vowel modification and a particular diacritic mark. ... Ü, or ü, is a glyph which represents either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, the letter U with umlaut, or a letter U with diaeresis. ... Ä - Wikipedia /**/ @import /skins/monobook/IE50Fixes. ... Ö, or ö, is a glyph which represents either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, the letter O with umlaut, or a letter O with diaeresis. ... Å, or å, is a letter, representing a vowel, in the Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, Walloon and Chamorro alphabets. ...


In Lëtzebuergesch, the native language of Luxembourg, the two dots over the first 'e' represent a stressed schwa. Since the language uses the mark to show stress, it cannot be used to modify the 'u' which therefore has to be 'ue'. Luxembourgish or Luxembourgian (in French, Luxembourgeois; in German, Luxemburgisch; in Luxembourgish Lëtzebuergesch) is a West Germanic language spoken in Luxembourg. ... See Schwa (art) for the underground artist. ...


As such uses do not mark grammatical variation, i.e. of tense or mood, nor syllable modification, they are not properly cases of umlaut. Hence it is improper to call these characters umlauts. Grammatical tense is a way languages express the time at which an event described by a sentence occurs. ... In linguistics, many grammars have the concept of grammatical mood, which describes the relationship of a verb with reality and intent. ...


The letter IJ is sometimes written Ÿ/ÿ, but this is not a standard use. Ÿ tends to be used because the "lange IJ" represents a single letter in all cases, for example IJsselmeer. IJ/ij are the actual single-letter forms, but these are poorly supported. IJ (IJ) is a letter from the Dutch alphabet used to represent the diphthong or . ...


Other evolved ligatures include the letters W ("double U"), æ, and the German ß. W is the twenty-third letter of the modern Latin alphabet. ... Æ, or æ, is a vowel and a grapheme used in the Icelandic, Danish, Faroese, Norwegian and Ossetian alphabets. ... The ß — Eszett (IPA ) in German or scharfes S (sharp S) if spelled out — is a letter used only in the German alphabet. ...


Diaeresis in Cyrillic

Diaeresis was used in the early Cyrillic alphabet which was used to write Old Church Slavonic. The modern Cyrillic Belarusian and Russian alphabets include the letter Yo (Ё, ё), although in modern Russian it is usually printed without the diaeresis (Е, е) unless doing so would create ambiguity. Since the 1870s, the letter Yi (Ї, ї) has been used in the Ukrainian alphabet. The Early Cyrillic alphabet was a writing system developed in Bulgaria during the 10th century A.D. for the writing of Old Church Slavonic. ... Old Church Slavonic (also called Old Church Slavic or Old Bulgarian, incorrectly Old Slavic ) is the first literary Slavic language, developed from the Slavic dialect of Solun (Thessaloniki) by 9th century Byzantine missionaries, Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius. ... The Cyrillic alphabet (or azbuka, from the old name of the first letters) is an alphabet used to write six natural Slavic languages (Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian) and many other languages of the former Soviet Union, Asia and Eastern Europe. ... Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using Unicode. ... Yo (Ё, ё) is the seventh letter of the Cyrillic alphabet. ... Yi (Ї, ї) is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet, used in the Ukrainian language. ... The Ukrainian Alphabet (Українська азбука, Ukrains’ka azbuka or абетка, abetka in Ukrainian) is used to write Ukrainian, the official language of Ukraine. ...


The Cyrillic alphabet letters A, O and U (А, О, У) with diaeresis have been used in the Altay, Mari and Keräşen Tatar alphabets for the sounds ä, ö, ü since the 19th century. In the Udmurt language, the diaeresis is also used with the consonant letters Zhe (Ж, ж → Ӝ, ӝ) and Ze (З, з → Ӟ, ӟ). The Cyrillic alphabet (or azbuka, from the old name of the first letters) is an alphabet used to write six natural Slavic languages (Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian) and many other languages of the former Soviet Union, Asia and Eastern Europe. ... А (А, а) is the first letter of the Cyrillic alphabet. ... O (О, о) is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet, representing the vowel /o/. Categories: Cyrillic letters | Substubs ... U (У, у) is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet, representing the vowel /u/. Categories: Cyrillic letters | Substubs ... The Altay language is a language of the Turkic group of languages. ... Mari, or Cheremis, is a language of the Finno-Ugric family. ... Alphabet for Kazan Tatar language Two versions of the Tatar alphabet are currently used. ... Udmurt (удмурт кыл, udmurt kyl) is a Finno-Ugric language spoken by the Udmurts, native of the Russian constituent republic of Udmurtia, where it is co-official with the Russian language. ... Zhe (Ж, ж) is the letter of Cyrillic alphabet which represents the voiced postalveolar fricative /Z/ (sound file), the same sound which is represented by s in the English word treasure. Zhe is the 7th letter of the Russian, Bulgarian, and Belarussian alphabets, the 8th letter in the Macedonian and... Ze is a letter in the Cyrillic alphabet that looks like a 3. ...


How to produce the characters on computers

The ISO 8859-1 character encoding includes the letters ä, ë, ï, ö, ü, and their respective capital forms, as well as ÿ in lower case only (Ÿ was added in the revised edition, ISO 8859-15). Dozens of more letters with the diaeresis are available in Unicode. Unicode also provides the diaeresis as a combining character U+0308. Unicode treats the umlaut as the same diacritic mark as diaeresis, and does not encode separate characters for the same letter with umlaut and with diaeresis. In those cases where umlauts must be distinguished from diaeresis, the special character U+034F COMBINING GRAPHEME JOINER (CGJ) can be used: ISO 8859-1, more formally cited as ISO/IEC 8859-1 or less formally as Latin-1, is part 1 of ISO/IEC 8859, a standard character encoding defined by ISO. It encodes what it refers to as Latin alphabet no. ... Majuscules or capital letters (in the Roman alphabet: A, B, C, ...) are one type of case in a writing system. ... Minuscule, or lower case, is the smaller form (case) of letters (in the Roman alphabet: a, b, c, ...). Originally alphabets were written entirely in majuscule (capital) letters which were spaced between well-defined upper and lower bounds. ... ISO 8859-15 is part 15 of ISO 8859, a standard character encoding defined by ISO. It is also known as Latin-9, and unofficially as Latin-0 but not as Latin-15. ... In computing, Unicode is the international standard whose goal is to provide the means to encode the text of every document people want to store in computers. ... Combining diacritical marks are Unicode characters that are intended to modify other characters (see Diacritic). ...

For diaeresis: X + CGJ + COMBINING DIAERESIS (e.g. a͏̈)
For umlauts: X + COMBINING DIAERESIS (e.g. ä)

It is then up to the user agent and typeface being used to provide meaningful distinction between the two characters. A user agent is the client application used with a particular network protocol; the phrase is most commonly used in reference to those which access the World Wide Web. ... In typography, a typeface is a co-ordinated set of character designs, which usually comprises an alphabet of letters, a set of numerals and a set of punctuation marks. ...


The HTML entities for these characters all end in uml; e.g. ä = ä. These entities however use the Unicode diaeresis codepoints when rendered. HTML has been in use since 1991 (note that the W3C international standard is now XHTML), but the first standardized version with a reasonably complete treatment of international characters was version 4. ...


TeX also allows double dots to be placed over letters in math mode, using "ddot{}", or outside of math mode, with the " control sequence: The TeX mascot, by Duane Bibby TEX, written as TeX in plain text, is a typesetting system created by Donald Knuth. ...

However this will give the diaeresis-style dots that are too far above the letter's body for good typographical umlauts. TeX's "german" package should be used if possible: it adds the " control sequence (without backslash) which gives nice umlauts.



On the Apple Macintosh, the diaeresis is produced with the keystroke Option+U, followed by the character to receive the diaeresis. Macintosh, also known as Mac for short, is a family of personal computers manufactured by Apple Computer, Inc. ...


Using Microsoft Word, the diaeresis is produced by pressing Ctrl+Shift+:, then the letter. Microsoft Word 2003 features a number of improvements over earlier Word packages. ...


Time derivatives in mathematics

The derivative with respect to time is often represented as a dot above a variable. Two dots represents the second derivative. In mathematics, the derivative of a function is one of the two central concepts of calculus. ...

This may be contrasted with the more common notation for a derivative using a prime: This article is not about the symbol for the set of prime numbers, ℙ. The prime (′, Unicode U+2032, ′) is a symbol with many mathematical uses: A complement in set theory: A′ is the complement of the set A A point related to another (e. ...

See also

The acute accent (´) is a diacritic mark used in written French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician, Greek, Welsh, Hungarian, Faroese, Icelandic, Italian, Swedish, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Vietnamese, Dutch, Irish Gaelic, Croatian, Navajo and other languages. ... This article is about the breve breve in music, see double whole note. ... The circumflex ( ˆ ) is a diacritic mark used in written Greek, French, Esperanto, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Vietnamese, Japanese romaji, Welsh, Portuguese, Italian, and other languages. ... A diacritic mark or accent mark is an additional mark added to a basic letter. ... The grave accent ( ` ) is a diacritic mark used in written Greek until 1982 (polytonic orthography), French, Catalan, Welsh, Italian, Vietnamese, Scottish Gaelic, Norwegian, Portuguese, and other languages. ... The graphic designer added the umlaut to the cover of Motörheads first album for æsthetic reasons. ... For other meanings of horn, see horn (disambiguation). ... A macron (from Gr. ... In punctuation, the term ring is usually reserved for the ring above diacritic mark ˚ (looks similar to °). The ring may be combined with some letters of the extended Latin alphabets. ... The tilde is a grapheme which has several uses, described below. ... Ä ä Ö ö Ü ü The term umlaut is used for two closely related notions: a special kind of vowel modification and a particular diacritic mark. ...

External link

  • Diacritics Project — All you need to design a font with correct accents (http://diacritics.typo.cz)


 
 

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