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From: mbut0135@w203zrz.zrz.tu-berlin.de (Matthias Butt)
Newsgroups: comp.fonts
Subject: Re: Umlaute [was: naive (...question about uncial...) ]
Message-ID: <617@mailgzrz.tu-berlin.de>
Date: 20 May 91 14:58:14 GMT
References: <1991Apr24.152455.22367@engage.enet.dec.com> <1991Apr24.180811.1957@ico.isc.com> <1991May4.190533.13629@ira.uka.de>
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Even at the risk of being very boring after some weeks of
following occasional comments concerning the dieresis/trema/
umlaut issue I have to say something myself:

1. kleine@ira.uka.de (Karl Kleine) is not only thinking small
but  indeed dead wrong when saying:

>(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.

Infact it is a funny perculiarity of German to retain foreign
spelling and plural formation with many loan-words for at least
a long period of time. However, not even in German the plurals
e.g. of english loans are always formed "correct" (not even in
educated language). E.g. nobody uses "Computers" as the plural
form of "Computer" although this word was borrowed from English
quite recently!

2. Let me just add that the lack of umlaut characters in international
alphabets and in the ASCII code need noty disturb our national pride
either. It just happens to be that the English writing system does not
employ diacritics and therefore always gets along with the plain roman 
alphabet. However this does not mean that this alphabet is anglo-
centristic. Its just the most natural "smallest common denominator"
of all alphabets based on the roman alphabet. Scandinavians and the
French for example share our trouble in getting along with such
international character sets. So cool down!

3. I think the following use of the terms in question is most
appriate (although outside scentific writing nobody will need to
bother):

-The two dots as a diacritical mark which can in principle be
 combined with any character are called *trema*.

-The term *dieresis* (or *diaeresis*) actually refers to the
 pronounciation the adjacent letters as two (not necessarily 
 distinct - cf. 'co/"operatin') vowels with an intervening syllable
 boundary as opposed to a diphtong (as in 'maid') or a single vowel
 (as in 'good', 'beast' or 'boost') which to indicate is one rather
 common use (but not the only one) of the trema.

-The term *umlaut* which literally translates to something like 
 're-sound' (with the prefix 're-' indicating some change like in
 'to rearrange') actually refers to the sounds which are the result
 of a historic change in vowel quality which took place in many
 germanic languages including German. Of particular interest with
 repect to the German writing system is the "fronting" of the
 vovels [a], [o] and [u] in certain environments which took place
 during the periods of Old-High-German (a.d. 750-1050) and Middle-
 High-German (a.d. 1050-1350). This process is still reflected in
 German orthography because the fronted vowels are written as
 /"a, /"o and /"u. In mani word stems the umlauted and non-umlauted
 vowel are alternating ('H/"ute' for example is the plural of 'Hut').
 This is probably one of the reasons why we still have the letter /"a
 which would be unnecessary otherwise because it is pronounced like
 the letter e.
 Thus it seems appropriate to use the term *umlaut* or *umlaut character*
 for the German characters /"a, /"o and /"u because they reflect the 
 an umlaut process in writing. In this case it is the whole 
 character including the diacritics (which in turn may be called 
 umlaut marks) which is referred to. The term doesnt seem to be
 appropriate to refer to characters with a trema denoting dieresis
 or some other property unrelated to umlaut as a phonological process.

4. Although umlaut characters (except for /"a possibly) do behave
exactly like other chjaracters without diacritics in the German 
writing system I would still consider the trema a diacritic which
is added to some base character. Hence I think K.K. is wrong again
when stating:

>An Umlaut (The correct German plural form is Umlaute, not Umlauts) is a
>completely different thing.

For traditional Typesetting there is certainly no other way of providing
diacritics and accents than by casting an extra letter. Therefore K.K.
is right when writing:

>In the typesetting business, Umlaute were never composed from the 
>base vowel and dots, but were always (and still are) letters of 
>their own.

However as far as I know the umlaut letters are usually exact copies
of the base letter (except for the diacritics added). Correct me if
I'm wrong! It is certainly true, that the placement of the trema is
a delicate matter (wich is by the way true for all diacritic marks).
In particular in writing this placement differs from mathematical 
typesetting because in math dots should always have the same height
while in printing text their heigt must vary according to the height
of the base character. Also the dots (like all diacritics) have to be
centered corectly. This is certainly not easily accomplished if the 
base character and the diacritic are combined automatically.

Matthias