What exactly is an umlaut?

[@NeverLoveNiila]

While this is much too complex for most of my students who learn German, it is so informative for me as a teacher and "push your tongue forward" is an excellent explanation for students who struggle with the Umlaut (which is most of them) Thanks a lot!

[@matt92hun]

Maybe you should still show them, or at least recommend it, there are some people who find pronunciation much easier if they have it explained in a more memorisable way than just showing them what it's supposed to sound like and telling them they'll get a feeling for it eventually.

[@NeverLoveNiila]

@@matt92hun a lot of my students don't speak English and since it is a class to learn German I normally find a video in German for them

[@matt92hun]

@@NeverLoveNiila Ah, that makes sense. That's probably better too.

[@GregorStrassburger]

To people struggling to pronounce the German ü, rather than starting with the letter "u", I learned it's easier to start that from "i" (at least the German way of pronouncing it: eeh (or iː in IPA)) then slowly "point" your lips, and listen to how the sound changes to ü. So, the term "i-mutation" seems to come in handy.

[@tigre3droyce771]

As German Native, i struggle with umlaut

[@charlesleninja]

@@tigre3droyce771 French natibe learning German : I find umlauts rather easy as I just "translate" it into French ä sounds just like Québec "aî" ü sounds just luke standard French "u" ö sounds just like standard French "eux". The consonant cluster are pretty different from the French ones so it takes some more learning on that Front.

[@Lichtkrieger13]

I personally use the term "ew" to explain ü to english speakers

[@nordscan9043]

@@Lichtkrieger13 In Swedish we have å, ä and ö.

[@christiankastorf4836]

I taught it just in the opposite direction: start with a long "u" and then slowly slide over to the long "i".

[@mjinhamburg]

Fascinating!! As a german speaker, 8 thought I knew what an umlaut is, but i have learnt a lot. Thank you !

[@Vargskinn]

As a German teacher, I like your simplicity, while keeping it reasonably detailed. Great job!

[@crestfallenwarrior5719]

Where do you teach german? Im german and im curious too.

[@Vargskinn]

@@crestfallenwarrior5719 I teach German at two Berlitz language schools and a VHS in the Rhein-Neckar region. I mainly do DeuFöV courses.

[@poissonpuerile8897]

An excellent explanation! Just two quibbles: (1) It's not the *jaw* that raises and lowers when vowel height changes, it's the *tongue* (the jaw may or may not lower concomitantly with very open vowels, but that's always optional). (2) That third German diphthong is actually /ɔʏ̯/, with a rounded second component. What you present for this diphthong is actually how English speakers inevitably pronounce it :-)

[@twinmama42]

To be precise: the chart represents the highest position in the mouth the tongue possesses while forming the sound as the tongue is always curved.

[@TimwiTerby]

I'm a native speaker and I say /ɔɪ̯/. When I say /ɔʏ̯/ like you recommend, it sounds like a regional dialect to me (but I can't identify which).

[@fariesz6786]

i'd like to add that the symbol /ʏ/ represents a different vowel quality in the diphthong, where it is pretty much identical in position to /ɪ/ but with lingering rounding, compared to what it the short monophthong is, namely more /ʊ̈/ (incidentally i just realised the IPA uses the double dots to mean yet something different than either umlaut or trema)

[@Weissenschenkel]

Just to spice up a bit, if you guys haven't watched it yet: kzbin.info/www/bejne/bJWkdnhte76EnMU fMRI machine showing tongue, lips, voice box and adjacent tissues. I hope you like it.

[@1ich_mag_zuege]

While it is true that /ɔʏ̯/ is the way the sound is most commonly written, there is much dialectal variation and linguists can‘t agree on the exact pronunciation. Wikipedia for example lists [ɔʏ̯], [ɔʏ̞̯], [ɔ̝e̠̯], [ɔɪ̯] and [ɔœ̯] as possible realisations of the phoneme /ɔʏ̯/.

[@arthur_p_dent]

Small correction, the final "n" of "Citroën" isn't pronounced nasally. "ën" is basically pronounced like the name "Anne" in English. (EDIT: Of course I meant to say that the vowel before the n aren't nasal.The "n" is pronounced and of course it continues to be a nasal consinant)

[@seneca983]

OK, so there actually is a nasal consonant at the end? Presumably the last vowel is still nasalized? (In case you saw my previous comment which I already deleted, please ignore it. I had misunderstood what you said.)

[@Weissenschenkel]

@@seneca983 here's a short ad where you can listen to the pronouncing. kzbin.info/www/bejne/aX2odWt9oZelibc

[@arthur_p_dent]

@@seneca983 no. The name does end on a nasal consonant, but none of its vowels are nasalised. Actually, in French the nasalisation of a vowel will _replace_ the nasal consonant at the end of the syllable. Either the vowel is nasalized, then the following n or m is silent. Or the n or m is spoken, then the vowel is not nasalized. Nasalized vowel + a following spoken n or m exist, but only if it's separate syllables. You'll typically see a double n or m there (eg ennui, emmerder. But watch out, in most cases a double n or m won't nasalize anything. eg, the vowels in "Anne" or "Emmanuel" remain unnasalised.)

[@seneca983]

@@Weissenschenkel Thanks. To me it sounds like the vowel before the 'n' *is* nasalized, but I'm not a phonetician or anything so I could be wrong.

[@seneca983]

@@arthur_p_dent Do you have a source for that? It sounds rather strange since nasalizing vowels that are next to nasal consonants is a very common feature in many languages.

[@jlljlj6991]

Also, ö is astonished (Ö even more) and Ü is grinning happily.

[@rushelm8101]

What a naturally great communicator and effective teacher. Excellent! Vielen Dank!

[@Ehrentraud]

Excellent video, I learned a lot! I think it was this type of content that made me watch many of your videos many years ago.

[@torstenpflug5084]

Danke für diese kleine, äußerst übersichtliche, Lehrstunde! Je öfter ich bei Dir reinschaue, desto mehr Spaß macht es mir.

[@HereIsSuperman82]

Äußerst interessant... die Überlegungen und Fakten über die Umlaute in verschiedenen, germanischen Sprachen sind eine schöne Sache. Danke 🤝

[@WeisserPaladin]

Finally another linguistic video - the original reason I did subscribe to you. Thank you, you're awesome! :)

[@NicolaW72]

Yes.

[@FlyingAt30000Micrometres]

Learnt loads from this, PLEASE do more as I have tried to get my head around this for AGES!!! I really don't understand the phonetic language

[@TheBastius]

And if I am not mistaken, the dots on top of a, o, and u come from the handwriting Kurrent where the e is written like an n. The n is then written on top of a, o, and u and reduced to two small, vertical lines and later simplified with mere dots. That's why the 'long' versions of ä, ö, and ü are written ae, oe, and ue.

[@poissonpuerile8897]

Correct.

[@HeadsFullOfEyeballs]

Yup! And the reason we write two dots these days instead of two lines is because when we started printing German in Antiqua instead of Fraktur, printers already had dots lying around for the trema/diaeresis and just used those.

[@nirfz]

Sure about that? the e in Kurrent as far as i know is basically like 11 where the second 1 is touching the front 1 above the mid height and has a diagonal line attached to the bottom rear. But with the the n (and u because they look the same while the u has a little line over the top to distinguish it) the second vertical line is connected to the bottom of the first vertical line. Like и but with a diagonal line attached to the front and back. (And the Kurrent examples and handwriting i have seen and read had nothing above a and o.) So as far as i know e and n are not looking the same, but n and u are, and there's no problem in writing ä, ö and ü by using dots and it was used in examples i have seen.

[@TheBastius]

@@nirfz I didn't say e and look the same but that the e is written like an n (I didn't even mean the Kurrent-n; just that it looks like as though it were an n). *_"and there's no problem in writing ä, ö and ü by using dots and it was used in examples i have seen."_* It's about the origin of the two dots. From what I could find: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)#History_2

[@nirfz]

@@TheBastius ok, sorry for the misunderstanding.

[@brucequinn]

"Lauftschrift Erklaerer" ! Love it.

[@reda84.]

I'm a french person here and you pronounced citroën as /sitʁoɛ̃/ where the en is nasalised, but in reality it's /sitʁoɛn/ as it isn't nasalised

[@seneca983]

Presumably it's [sitʁoɛ̃n] or [sitʁõɛ̃n]? I'd think it would feel a bit awkward to say a vowel next a nasal consonant without nasalizing the vowel.

[@arthur_p_dent]

@@seneca983 nope. Not sure what your native language is, but in French, the nasalization of a vowel _replaces_ an n or m - iow you only nasalize where an n or m remains silent. If the n is spoken, you don't nasalize. And if fact, in (standard) German, you literally never nasalize a vowel, except in some words of foreign (usually French) origin. (some dialects do have nasals though) Nothing "awkward" here, just a matter of what you are used to.

[@reda84.]

@@seneca983 nope, in french, either the vowel is nasalised and the n is silent or the vowel isn't nasalised and the n is pronounced. So nasalised + pronounced n is impossible

[@arthur_p_dent]

@@reda84. it can happen if the next syllable begins with an n, though, as in "ennui".

[@reda84.]

@@arthur_p_dent that is right, but it's only with two syllables back to back, within a single syllable, it's impossible

[@TheBastius]

In Spanish, there is an ü, too. It has the same function as the trema above the e. Famous example is the word "vergüenza" (it means "shame"). Without it, it would be pronounced more or less like the German prefix "ge-".

[@kenninast]

1. I'm a native speaker of both Dutch (school) and German (parents). Yet nearly the entirety of your explanation of the umlaut was brand new information to me. So, thanks a lot! I learned quite a bit about my own language! 2. You spoke about the trema. You said that the two dots are used as a notation of an umlaut in Germanic languages, while in Romance languages, they represent a trema. That's not entirely correct. Dutch is unmistakably a Germanic language, yet we use it as a trema and not as an umlaut notation. Example: to end in German is beenden. The two E are pronounced separately. When we see this word in Dutch, we see a plural word meaning "strode" as in "we strode", "they strode ". It's the past tense of "to stride". We pronounce it with a long E sound. The German word "beenden", is in Dutch "beëindigen". You can easily see that these are cognates, but in Dutch we need the trema.

[@captainkacke1651]

I remember studying all of this when I went to uni to study German Linguistics. Dropped out after two semesters and went onto Japanology instead, but this was kind of a throwback to that time🙃

[@Urspo]

this is an excellent one. I love the grammar entries to help explain and pronounce German.

[@santas_claws]

Excellent, as always.

[@sarah8383]

Very good video and great explanation!

[@ChasedWheels]

danke für die Lektion

[@MickeysMice]

The French don't put the two dots above the e in citroen. However, the Citroen/Citroën brothers were French who grew up in the Netherlands. As the Dutch mispronounced their family name (in Dutch "oe" is a diphtong) they added the two dots to have it correctly pronounced (instead of 'lemon', which 'citroen' means in Dutch). When the family relocated to France, they kept the dots.

[@gentsracer1845]

What's interesting also is that the two dots are the remnants of a "gothic" letter "e" written above the vowel. That's why in handwritten German they should actually be two short strokes, dots are for print only

[@TremereTT]

Holy shit are you good! Danke! Das war eines des besten Videos , ever. Did you just knew that by profession or did you research it just for us?

[@meteorplum]

Something I learned in my German as a second language class in Vienna: the easy way to remember how to pronounce an umlauted vowel is to shape the mouth as though you were going to say the plain vowel, then say the German "i".

[@soundscape26]

I can't honestly say I got all of that but the explanation was exceptionally well done.

[@LuminalSpoon]

I think I've learned more about the German language in 8 minutes than I did in 2 years of High School.

[@Nikioko]

The umlaut means: Push your tongue forward in comparison to the normal vowel. Ü is basically an I with the lips formed like an O/U.

[@thomasvieth6063]

I am German, so I am quite familiar with those sounds. However, some non-German speaker explained a bit of it in a very wholesome fashion. Consider singing overtone vowels. When You shift from u or from o you get the umlaut and, as a bargain, the overtone as well. You only have to practice a bit. But don't forget that French, Dutch, the Scandinavian languages, Turkic languages, Mongolian .... have those sounds as well

[@jovetj]

It's little known and seldom used these days, but English also has a diaresis (I presume) for the same purpose of separating vowels to ensure they are separately pronounced. The word *_naïve_* used to be formally spelled that way to demark the _i_ and the _a_ as separate. Similarly, you have *_coöperation_* which, of course, is never pronounced like a chicken coup. My personal favorite use of this is to differentiate between words like *_blessed_* as in "BLĔS•t" and *_blessëd_* as in "BLĔS•sĕd" which are typically written identically.

[@SiqueScarface]

Citroën is actually not a french diaeresis, but a flemish one. In regular dutch/flemish spelling, 'oe' represents an u sound. But in the case of the name Citroën, it's actually o-e, thus the diaeresis.

[@Automatik234]

I love these kinds of videos! Please do more of these in the future!

[@guyvert49]

you have omitted an important point here. The 2 dots are in fact very modern. Previously they were 2 downward strokes [still being written as such in the 60's]. Before that they were a Gothic "e" , looking much like our modern "u", written above the vowel. [Gothic script was taught widely in German schools until about 1930] This is why, if German cannot use the "Umlaut" from a keyboard, the letters are written ae- oe- ue- aeu. As for "Manniz", my understanding is that the plural was "manniro" [viz. German Maenner], but this may well depend upon case endings. I hope you enjoyed this little lesson. BTW Gaense is our Geese & I wonder how the Polish Gesi came about. Is it a German loan word?

[@Ragnar8504]

In handwriting I believe it's still two downward strokes rather than dots, it definitely was when I learned to write in the first half of the 90s. I don't have kids myself so I'm not familiar with what's taught at the moment.

[@amirabu-slayyeh6702]

Unterschied zwischen rosten und rösten: rosten = unter Einwirkung von Feuchtigkeit gelblich bis rötlich braun werden Beispiel: Metall rostet, wenn es nass wird. rösten = etwas längere Zeit ohne Zusatz von Fett oder Wasser grosser Hitze aussetzen, sodass es gar wird, eine braune Kruste bekommt, knusprig wird Beispiel: Essen auf dem Grill rösten

[@brendanfalvy1281]

Have you ever noticed that there is a great example of this vowel harmonising in English that reflects the I-mutation process very well, but it's easy to gloss over as a native English speaker because we don't fully represent the vowel changes in the plural. We write "women", but the vowel in the first syllable shifts to match "-men". I'm sure that in most English dialects, if this didn't happen, "woman" and "women" would be indistinguishable in fluid speech.

[@DavidMaurand]

I tend to see the written two-dot umlaut as a calligrapher's shorthand for a 'missing' letter, in German that being an 'e' - I take this cue from French, where (for example) the circumflex over e in arrêt signifies an unwritten 's', i.e. arrest. In English, this *typographic umlaut can be seen in the apostrophe. In the possessive case, it signifies an unwritten 'e', "Will's (Willes) pen name", or an 'i', "the play's the thing', or an 'o', don't. As in the German *linguistic umlaut, it can stand as a pronunciation guide, not merely a marker for missing letters: in the sailor's English, "forecastle" is pronounced and stylistically written as fo'c'sle.

[@premierexterior8720]

Wow!.. Very interesting.

[@111BAUER111]

Sowas halte ich schnell mal für komisch und theoretisches BlaBla. Ich denke dann "Ach, ich bekomm doch auch den Laut halbwegs zu stande, wenn ich es bewusst anders mache". Dann hab ich AAA gesagt, den Finger leicht auf die Zunge gelegt, bin zum ÄÄÄ übergegangen und tatsache, die Zunge geht leicht nach vorne. Bei O zu Ö und U zu Ü auch. Ich bin begeistert, weil ich noch nie so bewusst meine Zunge bei der Lauterzeugung wahrgenommen hab :D

[@christiankastorf1427]

That is the way I taught my British pupils how to form vowels, diphtongs and "Umlaute" that are unknown in the English-speaking community. Every student of a language has to do seminars in linguistics and be able to explain where a sound is formed and how it is done. This here is the field of phonetics and phonology. We use the same terminology to name the individual parts of the mouth, jaws and throat than a dentist or any other medical person.

[@Lampe2020]

Finally I can describe to other people how to make an Umlaut, just try the base vowel and put the tongue to the front!

[@Lugmillord]

That shift from back to front is really interesting.

[@casperhermans]

I'm Dutch and the example you give at the end (man/men) is interesting to me. In Dutch the pronunciation in plural doesn't change: man/mannen

[@peggideedee344]

Such an informative video - I learnt a lot so thank you 🙏

[@DeliPlays]

One technique I always explain to someone trying to learn an umlaut: say /e:/ as in 'gehen' and then change the position of your lips to the umlaut you are trying to say. Articulate an /e:/ and form your lips as you would saying /a:/ and the sound you produce is the umlaut 'Ä'. Same works for 'Ö' and 'Ü' if you change your lips to the /o:/ and /u:/ position. TLDR: say E, move your lips as you would saying A, O, or U without moving your toung and you just said their respective umlaut.

[@SaschaAtrops]

Learning German as a German. :-D Great content.

[@minusstage3]

It all began with the missing eye! 🙏🎯

[@mergele1000]

Been a long time since you did some language theory. Blast from the past.

[@Hand-in-Shot_Productions]

I found this video quite informative! I, for instance, now know that an ancestral I may have caused "men" to be the plural of "man"! Thanks for the video!

[@adamzieba8364]

0:02 It reminded me that in Bavaria (or maybe only in Upper Palatinate /Oberpfalz/) they pronounce all numbers containing the digit 5 without an Umlaut, for example 15 is pronounced "fuchtzehn" and 50 is "fuchtzig".

[@jensschroder8214]

In the past, no two dots were placed over the "ÄÖÜ" but a small "e" was written above it. So you can substitute ä = ae, ö = oe, ü = ue. There are names that are written with one or the other variant. Examples of false umlauts that follow the French rule are the names: Piëch, Hoëcker I like the example Männer - men. The same aloud just spelled differently.

[@wernerhiemer406]

War ja klar, dass der jetzt kommt, auch wenn er immer draussen ist. Zumindest bei den Köpfen damals.

[@AlexJones-ue1ll]

@@wernerhiemer406 Ich vermute die Referenz wird nicht jeder verstehen. 😀

[@igorjee]

Same as in Hungarian of the 16th century, small e above o and u. Latin script has always been a pain, we had our own derived from the Orkhon (Old Turkic) script which had a perfect sound-character correspondence for Hungarian. It has been revived a little bit in the last century and particularly after 1989.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

@@igorjee Totally support that. A written form that has a perfect representation for the spoken will obviously be way easier to learn.

[@rzeka]

Fun fact: some non-Germanic languages that have /ø/ and /y/ phonemes also use the letters ö and ü for them, even though they aren't the result of umlaut. The classic examples are Turkish and Finnish. Hungarian even invented the letters ő and ű to represent the long versions of those sounds!

[@2712animefreak]

Although it's for a similar reason: vowel harmony. It's just backwards, the suffix is affected by the root vowel(s).

[@seneca983]

Though in Finnish the close front rounded vowel is written with 'Y' rather than 'Ü'. However, I personally think 'Ü' would be more logical.

[@rzeka]

@@seneca983 whoops, I was thinking of Estonian, sorry.

[@rzeka]

@@2712animefreak You're right, in affixes and compounds the vowel harmony can create rounded front vowels, but that's not why those vowels exist in those languages. In Uralic and Turkic, there are tons of root words that have front rounded vowels by themselves. The front rounded vowels go all the way back to the proto languages, and I don't think that's the case for Germanic.

[@berndtsoderstrom4664]

Finnish uses Y to represent /y/. On the other hand, Finnish uses Ä to represent /æ/ (the A in English "cat").

[@ruedigernassauer]

These diacritics stand for FIVE types of letters: ❶ The trema (=diaresis), that makes the designated letter audible (this applies only to "u") after "g" (for French, Spanish and Portuguese) or "q" (for Portuguese, this has become optional) or separates it from a diphthong or a monothongized cluster (such as "au", "ou" or "eu" in French), this being valid for all vowels including vocal "y". ❷ A sound regarded as distinct as in "gün" (=day) or "yöl" (=way) in Turkish. In Turkish this new letter cannot be split into "vowel + e". The same applies to the Albanian "ë" (pronounced as "ɜ" when stressed or as a schwa when unstressed. In Cyrillics there is also a letter "ë". There it is pronounced "yo". And in the Ukrainian variant of the Cyrillic alphabet a letter " ï " exists (example: "Україна"). It is pronounced "yi". These two Cyrillic letters are regarded as proper letters in their own right. ❸ An "umlaut" (=" sound around") which literally means that a basic letter such as "a", "o", "u" or the diphthong "au" is transformed in its pronunciation by a derivation. So derived from "Tag" (=day) there is "täglich" (daily). The "umlaut" can be split into "vowel + e" for example for e-mail adresses where a trema cannot be used. In German "äu" (pronounced "oi") is always a derivation of "au" whereas "ä", "ö", and "ü" without derivation exist but are very rare (example: grün (=green), stöhnen (to moan), any more?). If you say "böse" the derivation here is "boshaft", for "Käse" it is "Kasein", for "hören" it is "horchen". ❹ In the transcription of the tonal language Sango spoken in the Centralafrican Republic these diacritics mark a "middle tone". ❺ The Dutch letter combination "IJ" (pronounced as "ay" in "way") used to be written as "Ÿ" which nowadays is antiquated. The pronunciation of "IJ" in old Dutch was simply a long "i". This place has been taken by the "ie" that in old Dutch was pronounced like the diphthong in Vietnamese "bia" (beer). In South African Afrikaans "Ÿ" was changed to plain "Y". "Ÿ" is still used in rare French proper names as a diaresis (see 1.). **** By the way: My surname is to be found under category 3 and my wife´s surname under category 1.

[@powidlkm]

"A sound regarded as distinct as in "gün" ..." should be "a letter regarded as distinct..." because a distinct sound it is also in the umlaut case.

[@stefaniel.]

Hammer, sehr interessant!

[@frankhooper7871]

It's not often that a rewboss video sends me running for my dictionary, but the pronunciation of 'dieresis' certainly did. I had to question whether my pronunciation was a hold-over from my US education, so grabbed my UK Chambers dictionary...whew! my pronunciation agrees with the dictionary with the stress on the first 'e' and not on the second one. ETA: and yes, I did know that the 'ee' in geese was an umlaut an that the ë in Noël wasn't.

[@Yogajuergen]

Thank you so much for this interesting video :-)

[@IvanTheLeiwand]

I love when rewboss becomes sideboss. It's a rare phenomenon. It happens in this video and in the Wochentag video where he is confused about the word Samstag/Sonnabend. Would be a funny april fools joke to record an entire video from the side lol

[@raghav1800]

Well I must say it's tough to comprehend this.. Bloody umlaut.. 😡

[@minusstage3]

Reconstruction of angelic sounds.

[@Houdi2]

Thank you. Very clear. I actually drove through the town in Germany where the umlaut was invented. Oddly, my rental car suffered a puncture there, something that I believe to be related to left over umlaut residue.

[@Rick2010100]

The Umlauts are also not only advises how to pronaunce, they are full own letter of the German alphabet. If some one would write that he is buying new Mobel instead of Möbel (furniture), the other would most likely not get what he means.

[@Modosco]

awesome!

[@swmoneyg]

4:00 Australians be like

[@talideon]

1:28 - "mice" is a funny one, because it contains two different ablauts!

[@francesconicoletti2547]

Did that iz ending if it hung around mutate into English’s plural s ? If so that would give a single origin in proto Germanic for both methods of marking plurals in English.

[@rewboss]

No. That comes from the nominative-accusative plural ending of a-stem nouns. These are nouns which in Proto-Germanic ended in "-az". For example, Proto-Germanic *hundaz = "dog" (singular; the plural was *hundoz) gives us Old English "hund", plural "hundas".

[@Eugensson]

In Dutch there is only a small number of nouns with the umlaut: stad-steden (city-cities) comes to mind. The rest are verbs.

[@Wardoon]

The subtitles appear over the examples of the German words. It would have been helpful if you placed the the example words over to the side about your shoulder, either right or left. In that way we could follow both the subtitles and see the example words.

[@hinzuzufugen7358]

".. there is also an open mid-backed unrounded vowel" - terrific, much complication pressed into narrow space. We Germans like that. Donka!

[@zioqqr4262]

Jederman(n) still meant "Everyone" up until very recently, when it fell out of use bc it sounds very grand-parenty

[@uncinarynin]

Wie kommt dann das "ü" in für und über zustande? War das auch mal ein u, das sich verändert hat?

[@theopuscula]

Ja. Und das Wort hat die gleiche Wurzel wie seine auch recht diversen entsprechungen in anderen indoeuropäischen Sprachen (z.B. Latein super oder Griechisch hyper).

[@jeanjacques9980]

I wish I understood this? Good analysis and explanation of the umlaut, makes you wonder how people ever learn German?

[@seneca983]

Can you explain ablaut next?

[@pamelakilponen3682]

We use Ä and ö in Finnish and it is a slightly different pronunciation. But ö is pretty much the same.

[@davidcufc]

Just out of interest, are verbs that mutate such as fahren → fährt also due to I mutation?

[@TheSimon253]

In Scandinavia we use Å as a letter. What's it's backstory?

[@TimwiTerby]

Extremely nitpicky quibble: you described the origin of the i-umlaut and then said “that's where it all started”. I do not believe that the -iz plural ending is the origin of all Germanic umlauts, only the i-umlaut. The other umlauts (such as the past tense one) probably go back to a different ending and turned into umlauts via an analogous, but separate, development. Excellent video, I enjoyed it a lot and I will show it to my friends who are curious about the umlaut!

[@rewboss]

I was of course referring specifically to the i-umlaut. The a-umlaut (which changed *hurna to horn) and u-umlaut (which changed *helustr to holster) weren't being discussed here. The umlaut you refer to as "the past tense one" is not an umlaut, but an ablaut -- this is a vowel shift that happened much earlier, even before Proto-Germanic, and is known as the Indo-European ablaut.

[@TimwiTerby]

@@rewboss Of course! Thank you for clarifying that!

[@weepingscorpion8739]

​@@rewboss Hmm, I wasn't aware of u-umlaut/mutation outside of North Germanic, an Old Norse example would be bǫrkr from *barkuz. Anyway, I looked round a bit, it looks like holster in modern English might be a loan word from Dutch or German and not a direct descendant from PGmc. *helustr.

[@MegaChaosGelee]

Even though not technically correct, in my opinion people who learn or use German should really think of umlauts as separate, distinct additional letters in the alphabet to understand their role. They are way more important than just decoration, or just a funny way to pronounce a couple of vowels, if you know what I mean. They are not optional and can instead completely change the meaning and the sound of words. People who don't know better tend to simply leave out the dots to create the umlaut, which is very wrong. Particularly when it comes to writing names, it seems even disrespectful to me (Daniel Bruhl instead of Daniel Brühl, for example). If you don't have umlauts on your keyboard and don't know how to create them, the officially correct way to write them is by adding an "e" as a substitute (ae for ä, ue for ü, oe for ö).

[@SylviaRustyFae]

Yeah, sadly i cant make the dmv here in MO, USA write my last name differently than it is on my birth certificate and they refuse to figure out how to add the umlaut dots (they still dont even allow apostrophes in names 9,9 The issue i had before i changed my name to include an umlaut instd xD). As such i am Mx. Soldner on my ID and Mx. Söldner everywhere else prty much.

[@danielcarroll3358]

@@SylviaRustyFae Names on passports, where they have to be in block capitals, is why upper case ß "ẞ" is now official in German. I had to cut and past the ẞ as I don't know how to type it.

[@connectingthedots100]

Wow!

[@Viertelhund]

So that's why German umlauts gets so easily overlooked: It's all because of a missing eye.

[@downhilltwofour0082]

Left me with my mouth hanging open!

[@jopeteus]

Why is ä pronounced as e? Was ä pronounced differently in the past (like the swedish/finnish ä sound)?

[@jopeteus]

@rewboss please answer I need an answer

[@hansgoober35]

4:54 I actually disagree here; I find that the long “ä” sound is more likely represented by the /e:/ phoneme rather than /ε:/. It makes a sound identical to French’s “é”.

[@rewboss]

This is something that linguists have been arguing over for decades now: the phonemic status of /ε:/ is an actual subject of debate. It's likely that many native speakers realize it as [e:] when speaking normally, but as [ε:] when speaking deliberately slowly and clearly. Since most dictionaries and pronunciation guides between "Ehre" and "Ähre", and between "sehen" and "säen", in their phonetic transcripts, that's what I went with.

[@TheZett]

@@rewboss As a German I can confirm your observation. In general, while speaking normally, the ä is mostly pronounced like an e, but if you’re talking about the letter itself, talk more slowly or in some select words, you pronounce the ä more like an æ and less like an e.

[@HenryLoenwind]

@@rewboss Trying to feel what my mouth does with those pairs, I noticed that the tongue position feels the same but that I invariable move the jaw in a different direction. During syllables with e my jaw movement is forward, with an ä it's backwards. To my own ears (which is fundamentally flawed when listening to myself, tbf) this makes enough difference to make those 2 sounds clearly different. Weird, I've never seen anything about jaw sliding motions in any linguistics video I've ever watched. Is it considered inconsequential because it's equivalent to moving the tongue forward and backward or is it something that's overlooked?

[@argyrendehringterimksaccu174]

Sounds like \i\ to me they raised their e too mu'-

[@argyrendehringterimksaccu174]

Too much*

[@EdMcF1]

When I studied German, I thought it might be better if there were an umlaut in 'umlaut', viz. 'umläut'.

[@CommanderSoe]

As someone with an ö in his given and sir name, I really like your video :)

[@hermannschaefer4777]

Just a note: Although uncommon, a Trema is also used in German, albeit rather rarely. If at all, it is still used to help pronouncing names and surnames, like Anaïs Nin, Zoë, Piëch, Noë or Hoëcker or historical Trema on a ÿ, eg. Stÿger (Stijger/Stiiger) instead of modern Stieger (ÿ is more a less a double ii (modern ie), sometimes also writen as ij or just j), Tÿrol (Tirol) or Maÿ, Julÿ, Seÿne Hoheit . It's not really used anymore, but you may find older people writing eg. Zaïre and Alëuten - I myself still use a Trema on Alëuten. In general: You still can use a Trema to avoid misspellings and to define the correct pronunciation of a word. Using a small tiny e above an u for ü can still be found in books around 1910, although already obsolete then.

[@arthur_p_dent]

You mean diaresis, not trema. "Trema" is the name of the points above the vowel, irrrspective of its function. In German, a trema above an a, o, or u denotes an umlaut. In many other languages, it denotes a diaresis.

[@ppd3bw]

A ligature ij is still used in Dutch and means a diphthong similar to German ei. Ice = Eis = Ijs :-)

[@hermannschaefer4777]

​ @Arthur Dent No. A Trema in German(!) is used to indicate/mark a vowel to get pronounced independently (or, historical, different). The (kinda known) surname Piëch eg. is written with a Trema to help with its pronunciation, i.e. "Pi-ech" and not "Piich", because an "ie" is in German normally a long i. Same with Alëuten, the Trema on the e marks the "eu" to not to be spelled as an Diphthong but separately: A-le-u-ten and not A-leu-ten. If you don't know the word or it's pronunciation, a German will say A-leu-ten - which is wrong. So, in short, every time a vowel could be mispronounced because of a vowel-combination (ie, oe, eu, etc.), you can use a Trema to help with its correct pronunciation. And historically, it helped to alter the pronunciation of some more, eg. the to most modern Germans completely alien ÿ. The Trema is not necessary in standard German, because there are almost no German words that can be mispronounced - albeit some uncommon words and some Eigennamen (proper names).

[@hermannschaefer4777]

@@ppd3bw Historically for quite some time, the j was more a less a long i and was even used together with an i as ij to represent a long i. In modern German, the long i is spelled as "ie" only, those older combinations for a long i (j, ij, ÿ) vanished over the centuries and the j changed its pronunciation to the modern use. The Lower Germanic "ij"-sound [ɛɪ] as often used in Netherlands, is more or less unknown to High German but is still used in northern German dialects (Nordfriesland, Plattdütsch etc.) and is something completely different.. ^^ Although the ÿ is still used as [ɛɪ] digraaf in Nederlands, historically it was used in German as a long i. And Germans tend to pronounce the ij a bit different, i.d. eg. Peter Sloterdijk is more a ['slo.tɐ.daɪk] than ['slo.tɐ,dɛɪk].

[@arthur_p_dent]

@@hermannschaefer4777 I know all of this. But you are not entirely correct - what you mean is a "diaresis", not a "Trema". "Trema" is, strictly speaking, the name of the symbol of two points horizontally above a vowel, irrespective of in what way exactly it alters its pronunciation.

[@minusstage3]

First there was the word, then Adam, and later Adam has to show Eve just how to use her lips and mouth to speak to the holy phallus.

[@mizapf]

Interestingly, I learned that Latin had a kind of umlaut as well in some rare cases, one of the examples being "tango" (I touch), "tetigi" (I have touched). So this seems to be an indo-european phenomenon.

[@fariesz6786]

that is an ablaut. in a way, umlaut and ablaut belong to the same category of phenomena, but don't say that when a linguist is around. the PIE ablaut is much older than the various umlaut phenomena in germanic languages.

[@arthur_p_dent]

different phenomenon that developed much earlier. Called "Ablaut". We have that in strong verbs in English (and German), too. For example I write, I wrote, I have written

[@arthur_p_dent]

ps of course in that Latin example, you also have a duplicated stem, a phenomenon commonplace in Latin and Greek but to my knowledge not known in English or German

[@mizapf]

@@arthur_p_dent There is one example of reduplication in the past participle of "essen" (eat), where we have "gegessen" instead of the expected "*geessen" (eaten), possibly because of easier pronunciation.

[@LucaPasini2]

@@mizapf The regional language spoken in the region of Italy I'm from, called Romagnol, which is a gallo-romance language, has a similar behaviour regarding the formation of plurals: the main vowel of each noun shifts. E' scherz- i schirz (the joke/the jokes), l'oc-i öc (the eye/the eyes), la man-al meni (the hand/the hands). It's not a proper umlaut phenomenon, but it's really peculiar and different from both standard Italian and other romance languages that usually add a -s to form plurals.

[@rw3899]

It is quite interesting that modern Dutch seems to completely lack this feature. Atleast, I can´t think of a single example.

[@rewboss]

Yes, it's almost completely disappeared from Dutch. The one surviving example is the plural of "stad", which is "steden": the change from /a/ to /ɛ/ is all that remains of the Germanic umlaut in Dutch.

[@Zortakable]

I wonder, why are Umlauts represented by an "e" (meaning when you can't type "ü" you can always type "ue") if they're i-mutations, wouldn't it make more sense to type "ui" instead of "ü" then?

[@mquietsch6736]

Sounds like a good idea at first. Only we have got ai and ui and oi as normal letter combinations in words (Kaiser, Ruine, ... ) and we don't like the idea of a letter combination that gets pronounced like this in some cases and like that in others. That's one of the specialties of English spelling, and we're quite content to leave this specialty to the English speaking world 😁

[@refragerator]

It's kinda funny that in modern German "man" (derived supposedly from 'mann' as male person) is just 'person' again. Or maybe it never has changed and we just don't know it anymore, maybe it was always neutral? "Das kann man machen!" = 'One could do that', a neutral 'one', that's embracing everyone and all of society. "So sollte man das nicht machen!" = "That's not how one should do it", etc. I'd love to know if we always kept it that way or if we just circled back to it. Either way, I'd rather have it mean a neutral everyone. :)

[@Jefff72]

I said to my date, who is today my wife, that this place is schwul as in humid. She pulled out a little dictionary and I wanted to say schwül. Look it up, there is a big difference.

[@baritonfelix]

It is worth bearing in mind that orthography is a man-made convention while spoken language is so to speak a natural phenomenon. You can speak a language without ever learning to read or write. So, seeing the umlaut as two dots over a letter may be convenient but is actually a flawed perspective.

[@KaiHenningsen]

Spoken language is damn well also a human construction. That's why we have several completely unrelated language families. Orthography is usually planned, whereas (spoken) language usually isn't.

[@havefunbesafe]

Shouldn't the word umlaut have an "umlaut" over the first u?

[@andreasmetzger7619]

Example of the use of "man" in german: Man ist schließlich Kavalier ("One is [a] cavalier after all"). It is used to describe a person or persons in general. Mind the spelling: "Man"= anyone, "Mann"= male human being

[@John_Weiss]

Even though it's probably the word one should use for the ¨ when describing its use in languages other than German, I _hate_ the word, “diaresis.” Makes it sound like your vowel has the runs.

[@arthur_p_dent]

Actually, it would be incorrect to call the two points "diaresis" in some languages, eg Hungarian or Turkish. Strictly speaking, "Diaresis" and "Umlaut" denote the _function_ of the two points. If you want a name for the symbol irrespective of function, "trema" is for you.

[@John_Weiss]

@@arthur_p_dent Definitely a better sounding name! Unfortunately, under the Unicode standard, that pair of dots is called a "diaresis".

[@天野やな丸]

Andean languages use it for vovwel length, spanish use it for distinguish gue /ge/ gui /gi/ & güe /qwe/ güi /qwi/, or a different sound like in swedish.

[@benmitja3372]

For me (a German) this is oddly interesting :D

[@confuseatronica]

If you don't know what an unlaut is... ..YOU are the umlaut.

[@AndDiracisHisProphet]

what is "eu"? like in "euch"?

[@Arcturus367]

Oi! Oi! Oi!

[@helloweener2007]

A diphtong

[@varana]

It's pronounced the same as äu (i.e. as oi or oy) but not (usually) an umlaut (i.e. a vowel shift).

[@steffahn]

4:54, your pronunciations of /œ/ and /ʏ/ seem way off. AFAICT, you’re just pronouncing a short /ø/ and a short /y/ here.

[@12kenbutsuri]

We have umlaut in japanese too, two dots on the letter that changes the wound. Portuguese brought it and defined it for us.

[@soundscape26]

Then it was the diaeresis, not the umlaut as Portuguese never had umlauts. Up until some years ago the diaeresis was still in use in Brazil but in Portugal it's long gone.

[@12kenbutsuri]

@@soundscape26 cool! I didn't know that.

[@argyrendehringterimksaccu174]

@@soundscape26 I thought he's joking about how some old japanese notation used that omlete two dots that comes from writing it as e diff from angstrom which is double vowel of Norwegian.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

But that is more changing the consonant part, not the vowel part right?

[@12kenbutsuri]

@@HappyBeezerStudios that's correct, for example 'ka' becomes 'ga' with dots. There were no dots before the Portuguese came, so people just had to guess which it was from the context.