[HN Gopher] Umlauts, Diaereses, and the New Yorker (2020)
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Umlauts, Diaereses, and the New Yorker (2020)
Author : jplrssn
Score : 20 points
Date : 2025-01-27 03:59 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.arrantpedantry.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.arrantpedantry.com)
| rwoerz wrote:
| Big surge of The New Yorker subscriptions in Saxony, Germany
| dhosek wrote:
| As an undergrad, thanks to the fact that I could easily do
| diacritics with TeX, I was overfond of using the diaeresis (I had
| gleaned from observation, not just in the _New Yorker_ but also
| the writings of Donald Knuth, that a diaeresis served to
| distinguish two vowels that were pronounced separately which
| might otherwise form a diphthong).
|
| The thing that helped me limit this practice more than anything
| else was a comment from Nelson Beebe that whenever he saw
| coordinate in something I had written, he mentally pronounced it
| as if he were channeling1 Peter Sellars's Inspector Clouseau.
|
| [?]
|
| 1. The _New Yorker_ style guide would call for this to be spelled
| "channelling." The diaeresis is not the only idiosyncrasy of that
| publication's style.
| wongarsu wrote:
| On a, u and o diaresis just replace one ambiguity (is it coord-
| inate or co-or-di-nate) with another (is coordinate supposed to
| be co-ordinate or co-ordinate with o pronounced as o instead of
| o). On e and i that ambiguity doesn't exist. So I find myself
| sometimes writing naive or noel, but never coordinate.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| 'Coordinate' and the likes make perfect sense to anyone who
| started out with a language such as Dutch or French where
| this is common. It's rather refreshing to see it used in
| English, where usually even the humble 'resume' must beg for
| its accent aigu.
|
| It never confuses me though, despite being able to read
| German as well. The mind just shifts to whichever language
| you're reading and interprets any diacritics accordingly.
| English just doesn't seem to fall under the 'those are
| umlauts' category of languages for me.
| CalRobert wrote:
| In Dutch I appreciate the diaresis in zeeen and the like.
| Can't think of an English example though.
| seszett wrote:
| Naif... if you can call that English.
| Symbiote wrote:
| It's English. Naive is more commonly known.
|
| Very few people would write the dots, but I wonder if
| that's more because they don't know how to type it than
| anything else.
|
| Here's a list: https://github.com/RichardLitt/diaeresis-
| word-list
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _New Yorker style guide would call for this to be spelled
| "channelling."_
|
| Wait, really? I thought that was a British versus American
| English thing.
| CalRobert wrote:
| But how do I tell you to get eggs from the coop without
| confusion?
| keybored wrote:
| I was on board with the fanciness of this editorial stance for a
| while. But after I recently learned what diaereses are for I
| think, what's the point? You know how cooperate is pronounced.
| You know that being naive is not being a knave.
|
| English spelling is bad enough overall but words like that don't
| even come up on my radar in that context.
|
| You know what a really good editorial stance would be? Simplify
| the dang French words. How am I supposed to spell beurocracy? Why
| can't it just be "byurocracy"? Please lead the charge on this one
| _NY_.
| int_19h wrote:
| > I think, what's the point? You know how cooperate is
| pronounced. You know that being naive is not being a knave.
|
| Not everybody does know that, especially not non-native
| speakers, which English obviously has in abundance.
|
| Dieresis is not really the best symbol for this given that it's
| much more commonly used for completely different things in
| other languages, but at the very least it makes you stop and
| consider why it's there in an unfamiliar word, and perhaps
| check its pronunciation in a dictionary.
|
| (The more sensible thing would be to use the apostrophe as
| syllable separator where necessary, as in na'ive, co'operation
| etc - it is already frequently used this way in English in
| foreign names anyway, and is much more intuitive for non-native
| speakers.)
| thangalin wrote:
| Another fun diacritic is the macron. The Mc in McCormick replaces
| Mac, and can use the COMBINING MACRON BELOW (*c). I couldn't get
| it working in ConTeXt, so wrote my own:
|
| https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite-themes/-/blob/main/b...
|
| When typing prose into my novel, if I use any of the words listed
| in the replacement text (McGenius, McNester, etc.), they get
| replaced with the C macron.
| lalaithion wrote:
| English isn't set by a standards body; it's designed by all of
| our little choices. And I think English is enhanced by the noble
| diaeresis, and diminished without it, so I will continue to write
| reelect, reevaluate, and cooperate.
|
| And maybe perhaps the pronunciation of diaeresis would be clearer
| written diaeresis?
| henrikschroder wrote:
| Ha, I get to do an ackshually!
|
| > The umlaut symbol originated in German but has been borrowed
| into other languages, including Swedish
|
| Actually, no. In Swedish, A is not an A with an umlaut, A is a
| distinct letter of the Swedish alphabet. Swedish has nine vowels:
| AOUAEIYAO, unlike German, which has five vowels: AEIOU, and three
| umlauts: AOU.
|
| The evolution of it in Swedish comes from AE -> Ae -> A, while in
| neighbouring Denmark and Norway, they kept both AE and O. All
| three languages also have A, which comes from AA.
|
| _Super-mega-pedantry edit:_
|
| Okay, the article says Swedish borrowed the umlaut _symbol_ , and
| this is actually true. In the 1500's when printing presses were
| becoming common, Swedish printers imported them from Germany, the
| German ones didn't have AE types, but they did have A types, and
| the Swedish printers essentially went "ah, fuck it, can't be
| arsed", and started using A and O.
|
| ...while the Danish printers also imported the presses from
| Germany, but said "fuck you, we're making our own types" and kept
| using AE and O.
| kps wrote:
| > _The evolution of it in Swedish comes from AE - > Ae -> A_
|
| Same in German.
| lalaithion wrote:
| The German umlaut also comes from small e superscripts over A,
| O, and U, so while the sentence is technically wrong I do think
| it's fair to identify the Swedish A and German A as the same,
| conceptually.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| Yes, both the Swedish A and the German A-umlaut came from the
| desire to have more vowels in the language and wanting to
| write AE in a more compact way, but no-one in Sweden thinks
| of A as "some kind of A". They're not related, there's no
| vowel-shifting going on, no case where words that used to be
| written and pronounced with an A are now written or
| pronounced with an A. There's no actual _umlauting_ going on.
|
| If anything, there's a dialectal glide from A to E in some
| places, so we think those two vowels have way more in common
| than A and A.
|
| If you write E instead of A in a word, we can read it, but
| you look like a small child who hasn't learned proper
| spelling yet.
|
| If you write A instead of A in a word, we're confused, and
| you look like a foreigner who's learning Swedish and is still
| confused about the extra vowels.
| lxgr wrote:
| Why would you say that A, O, and U are not vowels in German?
| Intuitively that doesn't seem true, but I'm not sure if
| linguists maybe use the terminology differently.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| Because they're not letters of the German alphabet, by
| definition, and they're not German vowels, by definition.
|
| They're characters that represent vowel sounds, sure.
|
| It's kinda the same thing as how in the English alphabet, Y
| is by definition a consonant, despite being used to represent
| a vowel sound in many words. (beauty, many, cyst, tryst, for
| example)
| int_19h wrote:
| By which definition is "Y" a consonant? It represents the
| vowel sound much more often than it does the consonant
| sound, so if you go by that metric, it's a "vowel letter".
|
| Of course, the more accurate take is that it's by
| definition neither a vowel nor a consonant because those
| are properties of _sounds_. They only apply to letters to
| the extent that letters consistently represent sounds, but
| when they do not, it doesn 't make any sense to categorize
| letters like that.
| Symbiote wrote:
| There's no official definition of Y being a vowel. In many
| words it is, in some it isn't.
| int_19h wrote:
| While we're in the spirit of ackshually, German has more than
| five vowels - that is why it needs the umlaut to actually
| represent all those vowels with the five base letters!
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| I enjoy the way that the New Yorker's style guide enforces
| consistency and precision in a way that is often lacking in
| English. Not just the diareses, but also the way they
| consistently follow the rule that when you add "ing" to a word
| that ends in a short vowel, you double the final consonant to
| make it clear that it is a short vowel. So the gerund of "bus" is
| "bussing", not the commonly used "busing", the latter of which
| looks like it ought to rhyme with "abusing".
|
| It's just clear that someone thought deeply about a system that
| follows consistent rules. You don't often see that with writing
| these days.
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