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From: kleine@ira.uka.de (Karl Kleine)
Subject: Umlaute [was: naive (...question about uncial...) ]
Message-ID: <1991May4.190533.13629@ira.uka.de>
Sender: news@ira.uka.de (USENET News System)
Organization: University of Karlsruhe, FRG
References: <1991Apr24.152455.22367@engage.enet.dec.com> <1991Apr24.180811.1957@ico.isc.com>
Date: Sat, 4 May 1991 19:05:33 GMT
Lines: 53

davis@3d.enet.dec.com (Peter Davis) writes:
> The two dots over a letter are called an umlaut.

And more people wrote notes to the same effect.

But, SORRY, that's plainly wrong! As already remarked, those two dots are
called a dieresis and separate two adjecent vowels. This is needed in some
languages. To all my knowledge of the English language, it can cope with
that problem without this extra mark (maybe you use them in foreign words).

An Umlaut (The correct German plural form is Umlaute, not Umlauts) is a
completely different thing. It is a character of it's own, not a vowel with
a funny accent. It is however closely related to the 'base vowel', which
shows in the existance of an alternate form, the vowel with a trailing 'e'
(which is however only legal, if the base form of the vowel with two marks
on top of it is typographically not available), and in text sorting rules.
The Umlaute are (in their replacement form, as this note is written in
ASCII) `ae', `ue', `oe', and their uppercase Versions `Ae', `Ue', and `Oe'.
Statistically, `ue' is the most frequent occuring Umlaut.

The typographical placement of the two dots is a delicate issue. In the
typesetting business, Umlaute were never composed from the base vowel and
dots, but were always (and still are) letters of their own. Only desktop
publishing with systems based on a purely ASCII view (read American made)
brought us the idea that these letters could be composed on the fly.

[ Aside to demonstrate the issue, not as a critique of the TeX-System as
a whole, but I think it's the best and widest available demostration of
the problem:   Knuth's TeX had that idea of letter composition until
recently (i.e. prior to version 3), where it otherwise took great pains
to get well composed mathematical formula. Well, Knuth had his priorities
this way, and he did a really excellent job. He has has learned better by
now by feedback from Europe. To illustrate the point, look at some German
text set in Computer Modern and using \"a. The dots are just not in the
typographically right position for a proper a umlaut. They are too high
above the a. ]

Summary:
(a) The correct plural form of Umlaut is Umlaute. You should follow the
    tradition of using the plural form of the foreign language in
    educated language, as you do without question for Latin, for example.
(b) Umlaute are letters of there own, not letters with some additional
    funny mark on top of it.
(c) Many fonts for non-professional typesetting (I do not have a proper
    term) are not suitable to set German text because of missing Umlaute. 
    Professional systems and fonts do have Umlaute as they have characters
    specific to other languages, like the French cedilla.

Karl Kleine						kleine@fzi.uka.de

FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik
Haid-und-Neu-Str. 10-14, D-7500 Karlsruhe, Germany