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Arrant Pedantry
March 24, 2020
Umlauts, Diaereses, and the New Yorker
Several weeks ago, the satirical viral content site Clickhole posted
this article: "Going Rogue: 'The New Yorker' Has Announced That
They're Going To Start Putting An Umlaut Over Every Letter 'O' And No
One Can Stop Them". I've long enjoyed poking at the New Yorker for
its distractingly idiosyncratic style,* but I had a couple of
quibbles with the article, so I took to Twitter to explain the
history of those little dots.
First off, those little dots that appear in words like cooperation
aren't umlauts: they're diaereses. But a few paragraphs into the
article, they actually correct the headline with this fake quote from
New Yorker editor David Remnick: "We already know some of you don't
like the dots. You probably call them umlauts. Well, you're wrong:
They're actually called diaeresis, so try thinking twice before
trying to correct us on how we use them." But this just introduced
another problem: diaeresis is the singular form. The plural form is
diaereses. That is, the second o in cooperate has a diaeresis over
it, but you'd say that the New Yorker uses diaereses in words with
doubled vowels.
A diaeresis is a pair of dots that appear over a vowel to indicate
that the vowel is pronounced separately from an adjacent vowel. For
example, in English oo is generally pronounced as a single vowel
sound, usually either the /u/ sound in boot or the /U/ in book. The
New Yorker puts a diaeresis over the repeated vowel in words like
cooperate to show that those two o's are pronounced as two distinct
vowels. This also applies to other words with repeated vowels like
reelect.
English doesn't use very many diacritical marks, and the ones that it
does use are almost entirely from foreign borrowings. But the
diaeresis is uncommon in English even compared to other diacriticals.
It mostly appears in French borrowings like naivete (though naive is
often simplified to naive), where it serves the same purpose: showing
that the two adjacent vowels are pronounced separately and not as a
diphthong or a single long vowel. (In French, for example, ai is
pronounced with the /e/ sound in bet, so without the diaeresis, naive
would be pronounced like Neve Campbell's first name.)
The diaeresis goes all the way back to Ancient Greek, where it was
also used the same way. Its first use, though, was to separate a
vowel at the start of a new word from a vowel at the end of a
preceding word, because Greek was originally written without any
spaces between words. The word diaeresis comes from the Ancient Greek
word for 'division', from diairein 'to divide, separate', from dia-
'apart' + hairein 'take'. That is, it was simply a mark that divided
two words or two adjacent vowels. Some later European languages saw
the utility of a mark that indicated that two vowels were meant to be
pronounced individually, and they adopted it.
But it has never been common in English outside of the pages of the
New Yorker. In Confessions of a Comma Queen, former New Yorker copy
editor Mary Norris briefly recounts the rationale behind the
magazine's style choice (excerpted here on Merriam-Webster's website
):
Basically, we have three options for these kinds of words:
"cooperate," "co-operate," and "cooperate." Back when the
magazine was just developing its style, someone decided that the
first could be misread and the second was ridiculous, and so
adopted the third as the most elegant solution with the broadest
application.
Norris also says that the style editor was on the verge of changing
his mind on the diaereses back in 1978, but then he died, and "no one
has had the nerve to raise the subject since." Norris herself admits
that "most people would not trip over the 'coop' in 'cooperate' or
the 'reel' in 'reelect'" and that diaereses are number one complaint
from readers, but apparently they're not going anywhere anytime soon.
(I think that if you're afraid to talk about changing your style
guide--especially when readers find your style distracting and
annoying--then you have either a bad style guide or a bad culture
surrounding your style guide or both.)
But on to umlauts. Umlauts look just like diaereses--you could call
diaereses and umlauts homoglyphic--but they're used in a very
different way and have a distinct origin. The umlaut symbol
originated in German but has been borrowed into other languages,
including Swedish, Hungarian, Turkish, and Finnish. But to understand
what an umlaut does, you need to understand a little bit about where
vowels are produced in the mouth.
The vowel /u/ (the sound in "boot") is a high back vowel: it's
pronounced with the tongue pulled back and the mouth only slightly
open so that the tongue is close to the roof of the mouth. The vowel
/i/ (the sound in "beet"), on the other hand, is a high front vowel:
it's similarly pronounced with the mouth only slightly open so that
the tongue is close to the roof of the mouth, but the tongue is
pushed forward instead. If you alternate between saying "oo" and
"ee", you should be able to feel the difference. The vowel /i/ is
pronounced a little behind your top front teeth, while /u/ is
pronounced towards the soft palate, also known as the velum. (The
vowel /u/ is also pronounced with the lips rounded, which has the
effect of enhancing the distinction between it and /i/.) And the
vowel /a/ (roughly like "ah", though not every dialect of English has
that exact vowel sound) is pronounced with the tongue in the middle
or towards the front of the mouth and with the mouth wide open. The
International Phonetic Alphabet considers it a low front vowel, but
it's also sometimes treated as a low central vowel.
What an umlaut symbol does, then, is indicate that a vowel is
produced further forward in the mouth (and sometimes also higher in
the mouth) than normal. For example, u is pronounced in the same
place as /i/, but it retains the lip rounding of /u/. Try saying /i/
or /I/ ("ee" or "ih") with your lips rounded, and voila: you just
made the sound of the German u. An o, by contrast, is like an /e/ or
an /e/ (roughly an "ay" or an "eh") with lips rounded, while an a is
raised to an /e/ or an /e/. (The vowel /a/ doesn't have any lip
rounding, so neither does the umlauted version.)
The term umlaut, which comes from a German word roughly meaning
'sound change', is also used in Germanic linguistics to refer to
certain kinds of vowel changes, especially when a vowel moves closer
to /i/. Sometimes, when a back or central vowel is followed by a
front vowel, we start moving our tongue forward a little early in
anticipation of that front vowel. In other words, the frontness of
one vowel can spread backwards through the word to the preceding
vowel.
English doesn't use the umlaut mark, but it's full of words that were
produced by the phonological process of umlaut. Plurals like men,
geese, feet, and mice were formed by umlaut. In Proto-Germanic, an
ancestor of English that was spoken between about 500 BC and the
first few centuries AD, the singular form of the word for 'man' was
mann, and the plural was manniz. That /i/ vowel in the suffix
eventually pulled the /a/ up and forward to /e/, yielding the word
men in English. At some point the suffix dropped away entirely,
leaving only the changed vowel in the stem as evidence that it was
there. In the case of geese, feet, and mice, the umlauted vowels also
lost their rounding after they moved forward.
Umlaut also shows up in English in some less expected places. Have
you ever wondered why words like busy and bury aren't spelled like
they're pronounced? It's because those words evolved in different
ways in different Old English dialects. In some dialects, the first
vowel umlauted and then lost its rounding, ultimately yielding an /I/
or an /e/. But in other dialects, they didn't undergo umlaut,
retaining the original /u/. At some point the two forms mashed up,
and we got the spelling of one dialect and the pronunciation of
another. The weird alternations in words like bring/brought and teach
/taught are also the product of umlaut, with a couple other
phonological changes thrown in for good measure.
So if the phonological process of umlaut is common to English,
German, and other Germanic languages, why does German use the umlaut
character but not English? It's simply because the writing systems of
each language developed separately after many of those sound changes
had happened. For example, the modern German word schon was written
schoene in Middle High German (around 1050 to 1350 AD). That final -e
on the end, which has since dropped off, caused the o to become
umlauted. But then, to make it clear that the o was pronounced with
an umlaut, people started writing another e after the o too. Then
they started writing that e above the o rather than after it to show
that it was affecting the vowel but wasn't really pronounced, and
eventually this superscript e simplified to two short vertical
strokes or two dots.+ And thus the confusion between diaereses and
umlauts was born.
So there you have it: The diaeresis is originally a Greek thing that
indicates that two adjacent vowels are pronounced separately. In
English, you'll mostly see it in a few French borrowings or in the
pages of the New Yorker. And the umlaut is originally a German thing,
though it also represents a phonological process found in English and
other languages. There aren't a lot of German borrowings in English
that use umlauts, so you mostly see it in the names of bands that are
trying to look a little more metal.
Now you know.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
* The New Yorker's style inspired one of my favorite style-related
tweets, from the inimitable Benjamin Dreyer:
One's house style oughtn't to be visible from outer space. #
totallynotasubtweet
-- Benjamin Dreyer (@BCDreyer) April 10, 2018
+ The tilde and cedilla were formed in similar ways. A tilde was
originally just a superscript n, while a cedilla was a subscript z.
The history of the latter is even right there in its name: a cedilla
is a little ceda, an Old Spanish form of zeta.
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Historical linguistics, Style 13 Replies to "Umlauts, Diaereses, and
the New Yorker"
Jonathon Owen
Jonathon Owen
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COMMENTS
13 thoughts on "Umlauts, Diaereses, and the New Yorker"
Author's gravatar
ktschwarz
March 26, 2020
Mary Norris won't quite come out and say it, but of course the
real purpose of visible-from-space style choices is branding. The
publisher wants to keep reminding you that this is the New Yorker
you're reading. They don't want people talking about "this great
article that I read, uh, somewhere."
Reply
Author's gravatar
Jonathon Owen
March 26, 2020
I've had this same thought, though I really hate the idea of
style-as-branding. In my opinion, the purpose of house style
is (1) to make things easier for the reader by providing some
consistency and, hopefully, by improving readability, and (2)
to make things easier for the copy editors by giving them a
consistent set of rules to follow so that they don't
constantly have to relitigate the same arguments over commas
and capitalization.
But style should be largely invisible (except to insiders
like other writers and editors who know what to look for). It
only exists to help writers write, editors edit, and readers
read. It shouldn't ever be a distraction from those things.
I'm not an expert on branding, but you'd think there'd be
ways to let people know what magazine they're looking at or
what site they're on without distracting them from their
reading.
Reply
Author's gravatar
Stephen Chernicoff
May 3, 2020
If you pay attention, you can hear the umlaut process continuing
right before your ears in contemporary British English. British
speakers are increasingly substituting frontalization for
rounding in vowels like /u/, /ou/, and /au/. When I listen to the
BBC news on my local NPR station, I hear them continually
pronouncing "boot" like "beet," "down" like "dine," and "I don't
know" like "I dain't nay." The degree of the shift varies with
the phonetic context and from speaker to speaker, but it is
unmistakably occurring in the British spoken language.
As an unrelated comment, if you find the New Yorker's style
stilted and artificial, you might consider spelling the word
"dieresis" instead of "diaeresis." It's more oeconomical that
way.
Reply
Author's gravatar
Jonathon Owen
May 4, 2020
Technically this isn't an umlaut process, since there isn't a
front vowel that's pulling /u/, /ou/, and /au forward. It's
just a widespread vowel shift, and, strangely, it's also
taking place to some extent in a lot of other
English-speaking countries. Here's a post about it on the
Dialect Blog from a few years back.
Reply
Author's gravatar
Rich Brotherton
January 5, 2022
Or you could go all in with diaeresis.
Reply
Author's gravatar
Stephen Chernicoff
May 4, 2020
I stand corrected. Call it what you will, it sounds to my
unprofessional ear like the same (or similar) kind of shift.
There's one presenter, in particular, who consistently pronounces
"BBC Newshour" as "Beepsie Neezaah."
I'd be very interested in reading that Dialect Blog post, but you
seem to have left out the link. Would you mind reposting?
Reply
Author's gravatar
Jonathon Owen
May 4, 2020
You're right that the shift you're describing sounds like an
umlaut. The shift you're talking about is a simple fronting
of back vowels, while an umlaut is a specific kind of
fronting that's triggered by an adjacent front vowel.
The link is in the last sentence of my previous comment, but
unfortunately it's not very obvious in this blog theme.
Here it is again.
Reply
Author's gravatar
LS
November 26, 2020
Thank you for your article! I also appreciate the background
knowledge and stories you provided.
Reply
Author's gravatar
Steve Barger
February 23, 2021
I'm surprised you omitted discussion of "trema/tremata." Some
pedants maintain that "umlaut" and "diaerisis" are the practice
or concept, whereas the mark itself--in either use--is the "trema."
Opinions?
I believe I was told once that the trema predated use of a
trailing "e" to indicate the sound change--that the latter
practice was incorporated by early adopters of movable type so
that they didn't have to maintain so many distinct vowel slugs. I
suppose I was misinformed.
Reply
Author's gravatar
Aaron O'Sborne
February 23, 2021
Cool. Now do "oestrogen" and "oecology."
Reply
Author's gravatar
Allan Kaplan
July 31, 2022
Your parting shot begs a discussion on the metal umlaut: https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_umlaut
Reply
The New Yorker magazine and the fixations of its outlier house
style - Johan Emerson Grobler
November 1, 2024
[...] Owen: Umlauts, diaereses, and The New Yorker. 24 March
2020.Jonathon Owen: The style guide alignment chart. 3 September
[...]
Reply
Steven Pinker's how-to guide is a jewel - Johan Emerson Grobler
November 14, 2024
[...] by Steven Pinker, book review: Ways to write in the 21st
century. 4 September 2014.Jonathon Owen: Umlauts, diaereses, and
the New Yorker. 24 March 2020.Jonathon Owen: The style guide
alignment chart. 3 September 2019.Nathan [...]
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