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From: amanda@visix.com (Amanda Walker)
Newsgroups: comp.fonts,soc.culture.german
Subject: Re: Umlaute [was: naive (...question about uncial...) ]
Message-ID: <1991May21.160431.13245@visix.com>
Date: 21 May 91 16:04:31 GMT
Article-I.D.: visix.1991May21.160431.13245
References: <1991Apr24.152455.22367@engage.enet.dec.com>
	<1991Apr24.180811.1957@ico.isc.com> <1991May4.190533.13629@ira.uka.de>
	<617@mailgzrz.tu-berlin.de> <TMB.91May20125338@volterra.ai.mit.edu>
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tmb@ai.mit.edu (Thomas M. Breuel) writes:

   You should probably also have mentioned that the German umlaut
   derives from two-vowel combinations. So, '\"a' used to be
   spelled 'ae'. The "two dots" started out being a little 'e'
   in Gothic script (which looks like two small parallel lines or
   like a small 'n'), then was moved above the preceding vowel
   (similar to the 'fi' ligature in English print), and finally
   degenerated into two little dots. The German sharp-s, a character
   that looks sort of like a beta, similarly, is simply a ligature
   between an 's' and a 'z'.

This is true for all western European diacritical marks, which were
not particularly standardized until the printing press came along.
Diacrtical marks originated as scribes' "shorthand" for common
combinations of letters.  German scribes used a trema for "following
e", French scribes used a circumflex for "vowel + s", ae and oe
diphthongs became ligatures, and so on.  Relatively few of these have
actually survived; if you look at a medieval manuscript, you will see
all sort of diacritics and abbreviation marks (the most popular one in
Christian religious documents was probably "ds" with a macron, which
was the abbreviation for "Deus").  Ligatures were more common, and in fact
survived into printing for quite a while, as did contextual forms such as
the long "s".  They only fell out of use in printing in the 19th century,
and are starting to make a comeback.

The situation for areas which weren't colonized by Rome gets more
interesting, since they tend to use non-Roman characters instead of
diacritics.  For example, Scandinavian languages use a mixture of
diacritics and non-Roman characters (the Icelandic "thorn", for example,
which was also in common use for English until relatively recently).

Standardized orthography, and the corresponding treatment of
diacritics and ligatures, seems (to me) to be more of an artifact of
the printing press than anything else.
--
Amanda Walker						      amanda@visix.com
Visix Software Inc.					...!uunet!visix!amanda
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