The Diacritics That Look the Same, But Aren't

[@anderji]

Ah nothing like Spanish pengüínos. Picky comment of the day... it's pingüino :P

[@kklein]

aaahhh there's always a mistake like that, isn't there? wouldn't be one of my videos without it

[@that_orange_hat]

@@kklein yeah also is more common than

[@kklein]

@@that_orange_hat this I am aware of: however, firstly I use aigüe to demonstrate a point about the letter ü and secondly I am personally a fan of the 1990 reforms

[@YodezoANEKI]

nobody expects the spanish pengüinos

[@nicolasglemot6760]

@@that_orange_hat I've always thought made absolutely no sense at all though.

[@thomasrdiehl]

"There are no lauts being ummed" - I did not know my German is an organ that can be in pain.

[@A._Meroy]

This was really funny word phrasing. Completely wrong, but very funny.

[@ateabrewer]

Very hilarious of you.

[@the_demon149]

Bout to um some lauts 😎

[@idontwanttobefishingforfish]

DAS IST DER UMLAUT ER UMMT DEN LAUT

[@Garbaz]

0:20 Native speaker of German, and I've always considered ä/ö/ü simply as separate letters. I had no idea that there is some systematic connection in the phonetics to a/o/u. Quite interesting. Also, writing umlauts like ae/oe/ue still is done in some circumstances, like in crosswords or in ASCII encoded filenames/URLs/etc, so the origin of the dots as an e still lives on in some capacity.

[@Benjamin-mq6hu]

Interesting. When learning German in Sweden I was taught that ä/ö/ü are not their own letters in the same way å/ä/ö are in Swedish. For example, the Swedish alphabet ends with these three letters, which I don't think is the case in German. Swedish crosswords also use these letters. On a similar note, would you as a native German speaker consider eszett a separate letter?

[@decare696]

not op, but also german and yes I consider ß a separate letter. As for the alphabet, I don't quite remember my time in primary school, but from what I remember, none of the letters äöüß were even in the alphabet. We of course learned them but the fact that I don't know where they would be is a good piece of evidence for them not having been included in the list. Nowadays I like to just put them at the end whenever I write out the alphabet (which, admittedly, doesn't happen very often), but some time ago, I used to put ä after a, ö after o and ü after u.

[@xCorvus7x]

How old are you?

[@ers682]

I do feel like ä, ö, ü (and ß) are separate letters, despite not being named in the alphabet, because they can completely change the meaning of a word (as shown in the video) and thus aren't replaceable except in the form of ae, oe and ue.

[@freshdumbledore8177]

In primary school (I’m German) we put ß separately on the end of the alphabet as a letter. But maybe my teacher was just crazy (she was crazy good).

[@白空-k1q]

Did I already know all of this as a German who learned French? Yes. Did I absolutely want to watch the video anyway and found it interesting? Also yes. I just like your style of explaining things, and usually I can still learn something new - so thank you!

[@jasper265]

A few weeks ago, I explained the right way to write a Dutch word to a German colleague. He exclaimed "with an umlaut!?" and I responded with "no, that's a trema, which is a competely different thing". I didn't know just how right I was though. (To be fair, I was able to explain how the trema breaks up digraphs, and I did have a vague idea about the umlaut having been stripes rather than dots until the advent of the printing press, but I didn't really know these wildly different origins)

[@DifficultGreek]

In Modern Greek, this diacritic ¨ isn't called diaeresis (literally: "division, separation") nor trema (literally: "opening, hole"). It's called διαλυτικά /ðialitiˈka/, which is a nominalised adjective (in the plural, since it's a pair or dots), meaning "dissolvent", and displays the same morphosemantic pattern as its English definition. Colour thinners and correction-fluid thinners are called the same.

[@kklein]

interesting!

[@chicojcf]

Dialutika?

[@leave-a-comment-at-the-door]

@@chicojcf the ð in the phonetic transcription is Eth, not d. Think "these" /ðiːz/ "them" /ðɛm/ "there" /ðɛɚ/

[@chicojcf]

@@leave-a-comment-at-the-door Yes, indeed. Not far from the sound ot Greek "thea". That is, θ. TU.

[@DifficultGreek]

@@chicojcf However, in older forms of Greek, you would have been right. The letter [Δ δ] was indeed pronounced like an English D, and the letter [Υ υ] originally represented an U sound like in English "do" or "Lou". So, /dialutika/ can be correct, but in a time long ago.

[@thalesvondasos]

The e above vowels didn't really _turn into_ double strokes, that's just what e looked like in certain German scripts.

[@kklein]

Okay, so this is what I thought too and what I originally wrote for the video! Sütterlin script indeed writes "e" as a double stroke - so that seems like a very plausable theory for where the double dot/stroke for an umlaut comes from. However, the problem is that the use of double dots for the umlaut predates scripts like the Sütterlin. It's still possible that there were scripts in the Late Middle Ages which had this same property, but as far as the evidence I've seen, we can't really be sure of that. That being said, I'd happily be proved wrong on this; it would be a much neater theory than "the e just happened to be replaced with a double dot".

[@HeadsFullOfEyeballs]

@@kklein _"However, the problem is that the use of double dots for the umlaut predates scripts like the Sütterlin"_ I don't know about handwriting, but the reason you see double-dots instead of double-strokes in early printed German texts is purely economic. Print shops already had the trema/dihaeresis type block on hand for Latin texts, so they just used that one instead of making a brand-new double-stroke type.

[@kklein]

@@HeadsFullOfEyeballs interesting.

[@fab006]

@@kklein Sütterlin is only the last version of a very old script.

[@kklein]

@@fab006 I see, that answers that question

[@deidara_8598]

The English language could really benefit from some diacritics, with the countless ways of pronouncing each letter. The verb "read" is spelled the same for both present and past tense, yet is pronounced differently, it would be nice to have a logical system where one can instantly tell how a word is pronounced just by seeing how it's spelled.

[@zapazap]

I have been working on such a system for teaching reading to children. Voiced vs unvoiced 'th' for example.

[@deidara_8598]

@@zapazap We used to have that, the letters "þ" and "ð" used to be the letters for voiced and unvoiced 'th' in proto-Germanic and old English. Sadly much of that was lost to time.

[@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714]

Inīd, ingliš kud benefit from a toutal raiting revolūšen, ēnd in it de ēding of dāiakritiks wud bī dan. Ālsou "read" ēnd "read" šud bī riten "rīd" and "red" jes de pēst iz laik de kaler.

[@deidara_8598]

@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 I like this way of writing. Exactly my thoughts.

[@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714]

@@kashubian_linguist Im afraid I cant read your giberish. It might be the latin script but that is not like alphabet Ive ever seen.

[@azarias5666]

The best exemple in french of that (3:02) is the word "gageure". Most people not knowing the right pronuciation (even french speaker) says it like "gagEUre" with "eu" making /œ/ but in reality it's just "ga-ge-Ure" with the e just making the g become /ʒ/. But now thank to the reform of 1990 it can be spelled "gageüre"

[@ocelots]

I was watching an old tom scott video earlier today where he called a diaeresis an umlaut in the name Chloë and I had this exact thought. Funny timing for me, btw thanks for always making great videos

[@gunjfur8633]

Which video was it?

[@ocelots]

I realize was actually a computerphile video (with tom scott), it is the one about internationalizing code

[@harczymarczy]

In Hungarian, ö and ü have always been considered as separate letters. They actually came directly from German. More to say, they also have their long forms ő and ű which are unique Hungarian letters. Since there is a correlation of length in Hungarian the long and short vowels are considered as different letters for different sounds. ä is not present in Hungarian as a letter but as a sound in certain dialects like West Transdanubian. On some occasions, West Transdanubian Hungarians use three different sounds for e: ä, e and ë (the latter being a closed e tending towards French é but it is always short). The two-point glyph on the French ü etc. is also called a tréma. It is mostly used as ë but never as ä in French. In Finnish it's more like an umlaut but y is used instead of ü because these letters of Finnish actually came from Swedish. In Estonian, however, ü is preserved as a German heritage. Finnish-like duplication is used to write long Estonian wovels, too: aa, ää, ee, ii etc. Correlation of length in Estonian is even more complicated because according to some Estonian phoneticians, five(!) degrees of length should be distinguished. There are at least three of them for sure but in written Estonian, only two are marked: n vs. nn (for consonants too).

[@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714]

My alphabet is e ē r t u ū i ī o ō p a ā s š d f g ģ h j k ķ l ļ z ž c č v b n ņ m and they are all considered seperate letters. lines on top being to signal that something is long or very long is how those letters where formed but they are considered seperate now.

[@erentoraman2663]

The trema is also used in Dutch words, like geëist or kopiëren, though there are loanwords like föhn and überhaupt where the two dots do act like an umlaut

[@Zwerggoldhamster]

You say "überhaupt" in dutch? ^^ what a weird loan word xD

[@MartijnvanBuul]

@@Zwerggoldhamster It's a bit like the word Schadenfreude - there's not a good Dutch equivalent. "Sowieso" is another one…

[@duckface81]

@@MartijnvanBuul leedvermaak

[@MartijnvanBuul]

@@duckface81Fair enough; I should have been more precise: like Schadenfreude in English ;)

[@anonvideo738]

@@MartijnvanBuul Schadenfreude - leedvermaak? I would say quite some german words do have a dutch equivalent but not an english equivalent. (zeitgeist -tijdsgeest, doppelgänger - dubbelganger)

[@alexanderlori7651]

Of course the German Schrift of writing the e back then just really looked like two vertical lines (which to this day are a popular way of handwriting your Umlautpunkte for them to be more visible), so it makes soo much sense that it evolved that way :o Amazing video as always man :3

[@kasane1337]

So true, bestie :3 (which is not meant to call you a "Bestie" in German of course)

[@rasmusvanwerkhoven1962]

Oh so that’s why Czech still got ů I’m guessing :0 Also, as a native Dutch speaker and German learner, I was aware of both uses, but I referred to both as umlaut, because that’s the only name that really stuck to me. So I’m grateful for the reminder of them having separate names! (I’ve also looked up the Dutch name and we call Diaeresis “Trema”) Another thing I’d like to share about the Dutch grammar, is that if the singular form of a word ends in a vowel (such as in "idee", "knie" and "bacterie"), it would get either -ën or -◌̈n suffixed to it in the plural form, depending on if the stress would go on the penultimate syllable (such as in "ideeën" /iˈdeɪ̆jən/ and "knieën" /ˈknijən/) or any other syllable (such as in "bacteriën" /bɑkˈteːrijən/)

[@Outwhere]

In the last Dutch spelling reform, the trema was ditched for a hyphen when two vowels were split by a glottal stop, so we now have zeeën /ˈzeɪ̆jən/ (seas) and zee-eend /ˈzeʔent/ (seaduck; for the ornithologists: scoter). The difference is not always straightforward. Words like tweeëndertig (32) and drieëndertig (33) are written like they are said in normal speech, although when speaking carefully we'd say "twee-en-dertig".

[@candyjaywee]

Yep, Czech has two "long Us" - ů (used in the middle of a word) and ú (usually at the beginning of a word). The ů comes from old diphtong "uo", where the o got moved on top the same way as the german e.

[@rasmusvanwerkhoven1962]

@@Outwhere ohh I wasn’t aware of that actually, as I recently (2 years ago) moved to Denmark-the land with , which underwent a similar and more-obvious process to umlaut. But that’s honestly a nice, sensible addition to the orthography

[@miewwcubing2570]

In my dutch accent a trema marks either a syllable break or a glottal stop [z̠eɪ̆.ə(n)] [bɑkˈtɪːʀi.ə(n)] and stuff like zeeëgel can both be with a glottal stop and syllable break but when the syllable break happens the first diphthong loses the slide and becomes a monothong again. [ˈz̠eɪ̆ˌʔeɪˈχɫ] [ˈz̠eˌeɪ̆ʁɫ] And with unseperatable prefixes it works the same

[@JF-wp2rz]

In Afrikaans we also do that, like 'geëet' as the participle form of 'eet', 'seë' as plural form of 'see' but also in words like 'voël' :))

[@WILLIAN_1424]

In the brazilian portuguese (Portugal removed it in 1945) until 2015 it used to have the trema (aka=ü) in syllables like "güe", "güi", "qüe" and "qüi" to tell when we should pronunciate the "u" in some words, but after the 90s New Ortographic Agreement they just said "screw it, I'm too lazy to press shift+6 in my keyboard" and removed it, even though the sound stayed the same. Honestly, I liked the trema and I think the change is stupid, it makes no sence to remove it if the sound is still the same in the words which used it. Here are some exemples: Words like "linguiça" and "bilíngue" have a pronunciated /u/ and used to be written with an "ü". And in words like "quem" and "aquele" the syllable "que" is pronunciate as /ke/, while the letter "u" is silent.

[@Guilherme_Predador]

É por isso q eu falo q o Brasil melhora o português

[@sem_identitificador]

Thsi change in ortography was made to unify all portuguese ortografies within the CPLP (Community of Country of Portugese Language) member states. But I'm still not over the loss of "lingüiça" and "idéia".

[@joao1812ful]

mas como (eu tenho quase certeza que) não tem pares minimos com e sem a pronuncia do u nesses casos, se torna meio desnecessário mesmo

[@AnglosArentHuman]

@@sem_identitificador Hot take: If the CPLP wanted to unify ortography, they should've based it on the Brazilian one. More speakers > being European. Same reason why (most) people in Hispanoamérica ignore the dumb shit the RAE constantly pulls.

[@NoLongerBreathedIn]

Spanish thankfully uses it after g. At least /kwe/ can be written as , so isn't needed.

[@ManicEightBall]

Actually, in Unicode, you can represent ü with the single composed character with (U+00FC), or decomposed as: u (U+0075) followed by ◌̈ (U+0308)

[@Liggliluff]

But, if I'm not mistaken, in the default text render engine, if you type the decomposed characters, it will render it as if it was composed. This so that font creators can just create a single composed glyph, which will also include the decomposed variant. So visually it's the composed glyph in both cases, but what's actually written in code is different.

[@mikemhz]

@@LiggliluffOn my keyboard I can press " and then press u to make ü. I don't know why.

[@V530-15ICR]

@@mikemhz because it's supposed to be that way

[@Liggliluff]

@@mikemhz That is part of the keyboard layout. Some symbols are marked as "dead keys", and is waiting for a second input. It'll take the symbol from the second input, go through a lookup table, and output that symbol instead. But if this symbol isn't on the lookup table, it'll just output the original two symbols instead. It's called dead, because nothing happens with a simple press. But it can only output one symbol through this system, so all symbols outputted must be composed characters.

[@eddiesantos7232]

Both forms are canonically equivalent :) U+00FC is the NFC (composed) form and ‘u’ followed by U+0308 is the NFD form. Remember to apply normalization before comparing strings!

[@ricardoludwig4787]

Portuguese used to have it and tbh I wish we kept it, the writing is generally pretty phonetical in most words but that alone made a lot of pronunciations ambiguous

[@WILLIAN_1424]

Yeah, but for some reason our "lingüistas" (hehe) were too lazy to press shift+6 in their keyboards

[@brunoolas]

I also didn't really like the reform that took away our tremas. But learning from this video we weren't even using it correctly to begin with: it's supposed to announce the pronunciation of the letter as a separate syllable, yet we used it to make diphthongs. Lingüistas should then be pronounced lin-gu-is-tas.

[@WILLIAN_1424]

@@brunoolas there is no only way to use an accent. They are just signs, different languages can use them for different objectives. Are the spanish wrong for using the "~" in the letter "N" to make a different sound (actually, different letter)? No, different languages, different uses for accentuation, different ortography, different sounds for the letters, etc.

[@tonydai782]

@@WILLIAN_1424 The ñ is another example of a letter on top of another. In Latin, the words with the ñ in modern Spanish were originally a double n. Think annus vs año. The "~" is really a tiny "N".

[@WILLIAN_1424]

@@tonydai782 now I'm curious, did the Romans pronunciated the "double n" like the spanish pronunciate the "ñ"? I think not, but would be interesting if they did. As a curiosity: in portuguese we don't have the "ñ". To do that same sound, we have the syllables nha, nhe, nhi, nho, nhu.

[@supermarioenthusiast5881]

Hiii, one of the Turks out to 'come for you' here >:) And i'd just like to say... İ'd actually agree that i see the vowels "ö, ü" as their own letters, but only because we actually have a somewhat seldom used yet crucial umlaut, "Â". Take "hala" meaning 'aunt' but "hâlâ" meaning 'still; ongoing" as an example. İt actually indicates either palatalisation of the consonant before or an /aː/ for where the long vowel changes the meaning if spelt without (knowing which use is easy as it's based on the existence of a preceding consonant or not). İt actually used to be used for the 'palatalisation indication' purpose for all words with that application but has sort of just been.. phased out (unless it's like the "hala" case where there exists another word without the umlaut that has a different meaning entirely). This is why you don't really see "kâğıt, hikâyeye, mekân, rüzgâr" anymore, but rather their 'hatless' (as it's known in Turkish) spellings, for the ease of turkish typers (where the 'â' isn't usually found on the turkish keyboard) but also at the detriment of new learners, as it makes the language that much less phonetic and intuitive (and in my opinion pretty) as it otherwise was :').

[@3.saar.a]

Fun fact: there exist completely identical (CJK) characters occupying multiple Unicode places, because apparently, before Unicode was a thing, someone in Korea decided to assign to the same character one code per pronunciation, which Unicode *kindly* adapted/had to adapt. It’s not the same as encoding Cyrillic O and Greek Omicron separately, since the characters in question are completely identical from the graphical perspective. Only to spice up the confusion, there is a Kangxi radical page in Unicode which also contain some (near) duplicates if you only consider the shape. In fact, unlimited to CJK, the presence of duplicate characters has been abused in the context of phishing, misdirecting tags on social media, etc.

[@aiocafea]

gosh everything about cjk character encoding is such a pain

[@FlameRat_YehLon]

CJK is kinda just a huge pile of mess anyway. You get characters that are the same but assigned different code points, are different but assigned the same code point, and also tons of words that are either not assigned a code yet, or words that are assigned a code but the information system isn't using the latest revision of unicode so it won't be processed properly. Oh and also, OTF files are limited to 65535 glyphs so you can't even store all the CJK character glyphs in a single font file, and good luck with any system that doesn't support font fallbacks.

[@Carewolf]

Well, unicode is a mess, especially for CJK glyphs.

[@prismaticc_abyss]

I thought this would be about how apart from the ö Umlaut german also had an ő which had a slightly different origin story of how it came to be but since ö and ő looked almost the same in handwriting and were pronounced the same, the two letters were merged into one.

[@limeliciousmapping4652]

I'm german and never heard about that thing, please tell me about it

[@davidamadore]

Aren't you confusing with Hungarian, which definitely has distinct letters ‘ö’ (umlaut) and ‘ő’ (double acute)? The latter is the long version of the former, just like ‘o’ is marked ‘ó’ (single acute) when long. But I've never heard of the umlaut-vs-double-acute distinction existing in German, so if you know more I'd like to know.

[@ellies_silly_zoo]

I've never heard anything about this, not sure whether to believe you tbh

[@wilhelmseleorningcniht9410]

You're likely either thinking of Hungarian, for which double acutes are a distinct part of their orthography and are definitely different letters, or older German handwriting where the umlaut mark often looks like a double acute accent, something like Kurrentschrift or something. At least in the case of German, the 'double acute' version of the umlaut is just a handwritten variant and has the exact same origin as that of the double dot umlaut, which is a former vowel-E digraph (like ue, oe, ae, etc. In Kurrent and other forms of German cursive, these E's look a lot like a double acute, so put it above the previous letter and bam you get the diacritic)

[@A._Meroy]

Wilhelm is right, the hand-written e in Kurent looked similar to a double stroke, so usually in hand-writing still often double strokes or double acutes are used. If you pause the video at 2:27 you can see an example, it's the German word "schön" (beautiful) written in three different styles. The left variant is written as "schoen" with o and e equally sized at the same height, the middle reads "schoᵉn" with a small properly written e above the o, and the right one finally is "scho̎n" with the small e on top simplified to a double stroke.

[@HeadsFullOfEyeballs]

In the spirit of pedantry: Surely the general term for these additional letter bits is "diacritic", not "accent". Accents are a type of diacritic, but not all diacritics are accents. The Umlaut dots aren't an accent because they don't indicate, you know, _accent_ (as in stress/tone) and don't derive from a symbol _typically_ used to indicate stress/tone (like ◌́, ◌̀, ◌̂ ) either.

[@kklein]

ehhhhhh... arguably, yes... but "accent" or "accent mark" are often used interchangeably with "diacritic". I take your point but don't necessarily agree.

[@HeadsFullOfEyeballs]

@@kklein I mean, sure, lots of technical terms are used interchangeably in everyday language.

[@kklein]

@@HeadsFullOfEyeballs You see the word "accent" for diacritic in a lot of English-language academic work as well though, not just in everyday langauge.

[@HeadsFullOfEyeballs]

@@kklein I haven't come across that broad usage of "accent" in my linguistics work (at least consciously), but maybe it depends on the field!

[@kklein]

@@HeadsFullOfEyeballs That's a good point - it may be that proper orthography experts would always say "diacritic" as precisely as you defined - but linguists in other fields will just use "accent" more casually. Interesting discussion 10/10

[@harktischris]

welp i don't know what i was expecting when i saw this in my feed, but this turned out to be a super interesting video! i learned french in high school, and am a german learner now, and i was actually very surprised that in german ä ö ü are distinct letters from a o u and not just special accent markings. And then came trying to learn their pronunciation! this video ended up being a nice little origin story for the distinction between those languages.

[@julleri783]

0:18 Correct, as a Finnish person, we don't consider Ä and Ö as A and O with something on top. They simply are their own letters. At least that's how I have always viewed them. Although I understand it is easy to view it that way especially for foreigners, beacause in many word endings you choose A or Ä depending on the word you are conjugating, and just apply it to an ending. But again, this is something native Finnish speakers don't even realize doing😂

[@ABitSoupy]

0:15 'though its usually kind of optional' As someone who's last name is Noël, typing and 'simplicity' has basically forced it to be optional, but if I'm writing it out, I always add the accents.

[@Zunbil]

I knew about the umlaut, but I didn't know about its use as a "diaeresis" in French (and sometimes English)! I'm trying to learn French at the moment and some of the (absolutely insane) spelling conventions in French make a little more sense to me now. Thank you for your incidental assistance, and very cool video!

[@bigscarysteve]

French spelling has had an influence from Greek spelling, but I don't know how or why.

[@J.o.s.h.u.a.]

The French spelling system is way more intuitive than the English one, once you figure out how it works. It just takes some getting used to.

[@ruedigernassauer]

French speakers do say "tréma".

[@xouxoful]

At least in french, there are some rules/conventions ! 😉

[@dragskcinnay3184]

@@xouxoful exactly. There's lots of rules, and some exceptions (in spelling, not that many (grammatical exceptions are way more plentiful)), but... at least there are rules LMAO English spelling is way worde than French spelling imo

[@aurora_x86]

I find it interesting that Sweidsh has both the standard ö and ä umlauts, but also has the superscript for å. It's cool.

[@photonicpizza1466]

Fun fact, the name for the actual diacritic, as opposed to the phonetic/phonological phenomena, is the trema, from the Ancient Greek word meaning “perforation” (in reference to how it looks in modern usage).

[@limeliciousmapping4652]

Trema means hole but yes

[@photonicpizza1466]

@@limeliciousmapping4652 τρῆμα is derived from the verb τετραίνω meaning “to perforate,” so “perforation” is a far closer translation. “Hole” isn’t incorrect, and in most contexts they’re interchangeable, but it doesn’t necessarily capture the nuances. The meaning might’ve generalised in Modern Greek, however.

[@geometryjumpfl2784]

factual

[@JfromUK_]

I did wonder what to say in English when I'm not talking about whether it's used to indicate a diaeresis or umlaut -- that's mainly what I learnt here but thank you for clarifying. I shall now proceed to confuse people I bring it up with 😅 (I wouldn't say that term is recognised here in general.)

[@colonelpopcorn7702]

Huh, despite knowing how the Spanish diéresis works in relation to the German umlaut, it took me until you started explaining how it works in French until I understood what you meant by the two ü’s were different lol. Super cool video as always

[@jaycee330]

4:08 Also in names like Chloe, Zoe, the word zoological (yes, the two "o"s have slightly different pronounciations), Bootes (pronounced "boo-au-teez"), etc.

[@rdreher7380]

You simplified the origin of the umlaut in way that misses an interesting step. -In the fraktur script,- [correction] In the Sütterlin script, or old German cursive [/correction], the lowercase e looked kind of like we might write a cursive u, or two i's without dots, or really just two little lines. The e they wrote over the vowel was thus also two little lines, kind of like double acute accent marks. These two lines then became dots because the diäresis was a similar enough preëxisting option in type setting.

[@cube2fox]

Interesting. I remember when learning cursive hand writing in school, we were actually taught to use double lines, not double dots.

[@mquietsch6736]

Not in Fraktur. In Sütterlin. Fraktur is what most people call gothic script, it's for printing. The handwriting with the weird e (it's generally weird, btw) is called Sütterlin after its inventor. I learnt it from my grandmother.

[@rdreher7380]

@@mquietsch6736 Ah, you're right. Thank you for the correction. I was working from memory, and I had thought the lowercase e as two dashes started in Fraktur, and then went over to Sütterlin. But a quick search of Fraktur confirms that the lowercase e looked pretty normal in that script. I was also thinking that Fraktur predates printing, being a form of handwritten script at first, but a quick read-up on Fraktur confirms it starts in the age of print already. I was conflating it with Textura or Textualis, its predecessor, which was at first a hand written script. But anyway, Textura didn't have this feature either, it must have started much later in Sütterlin.

[@Designed1]

alright it's gotta be way easier to just type "pre-existing"

[@Kadima2k]

"there are no lauts to be um''ed." Honestly, that was one of the best remarks in KZbin history

[@neeshman]

that's so interesting, a couple weeks ago i bought some old math books from an antique store and noticed they spelled coordinate as coördinate and had no idea why. great video

[@kaiserkueche]

about "bluome" in middle high German, it was pronounced as a diphthong [uə̯] originally as it still is in most southern German dialects (alemannic, bayrish) It did became monophthongised in new high German to [uː] but this was not everywhere. I guess you were speaking about this period of time in your video.

[@weaverofbrokenthreads]

I read your comment and my first instinct was "no way we use these sounds in that word" (from an alemannic speaking region) so I said it out loud and sure enough... writing does weird things to ones perception of language, sometimes you don't even realize how you actually say things

[@Banom7a]

so it become close to English word "bloom" then, huh (OE bloom means flower)

[@VoidRep]

in the low german my family speaks, that sound exists in all the short vowels, like blumme would have the same pronunciation of how you said bluome is pronounced, although the e at the end gets elongated. we also dont pronounce the "ch" so it just shortens the vowel its next to. so lucht actually sounds like luə̯

[@guitargresurrect2117]

@@weaverofbrokenthreads thats the mothertongue phenomenon for you: we instinctively learn our dialects and regional tongues so we never actually realize rationally the "graphically rendered" version of the diphthongs we are uttering

[@francisdec1615]

Also the diphthong ei was originally pronounced like ey in English 'hey'. And ie was pronounced as a diphthong and not [i:] as it is today.

[@ruedigernassauer]

Another comment from me, sorry: As "ü" looks like "ii" in written language this "ii" is avoided in the transcription of the German language. German distinguishes long vowels from short ones using different systems (doubling the vowel, silent "h", silent "e" or simply by not doubling following consonant). There are "aa", "ee", or "oo" to show length, but in the case of the "i" it doesn´t exist. "I" is in standard German the only vowel that can be followed by a silent "e" to indicate length (the same thing applies to the closely related language Dutch).

[@chachasenri]

I have heard that this is one of the reasons why [y] is written "y" and not "ü" in Finnish, a language where "ii" is common. (The other being influence from Swedish orthographic conventions.)

[@reformCopyright]

I never thought about that!

[@viktorsmets29]

As a Dutch speaker myself I see that the system in German is indeed very similar to the one in Dutch

[@rudigernassauer6075]

@@viktorsmets29 In Dutch it is simplified to both save space and to make spelling easier to learn. In German it is deliberately overcomplicated to be able to differ homophones by their spelling (bot - Boot, Wagen- -- Waagen -- wagen, Sole -- Sohle, fielen -- vielen and so on). German has less homophones than Dutch (my favorite word there is "weer") but that is the system behind our sophistication comprising also capitalized initials for nouns.

[@notgonnalie5963]

What is the silent e in German?

[@mernov4334]

Turkish umlaut letters have some connection with their dotless versions too. Turkish uses 2 vowel harmony systems and in one of these we seperate letters into two groups: e, i, ü, ö in one group and a, ı, u, o in the other. This actually makes me think that it would’ve been better for us to use ä instead of e since German ä has the same sound as Turkish e.

[@newcantinacrispychickentac7754]

I actually really like the idea of using a diacritic to separate letters in English!

[@OntarioTrafficMan]

I frequently write words like "coördineren" (coordinate) in Dutch, and really want to carry over the same diacritic into English since it makes a lot of sense and avoids making one word look like two.

[@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714]

I hate it. Temas are not needed to natives.

[@sirius1770]

it makes my finnish vowel harmony brain hurt so much to see o and ö right next to each other in the same word and it makes me want to pronounce the ö completely different from o

[@Anhilare]

properly, the terms "umlaut" and "diaeresis" refer to the specific phonological processes marked by the diacritic, which is called a trema. umlaut refers to a specific type of vowel mutation where a following vowel changes a preceding one. a classic example is mūs > mouse, mūsiz > mȳs > mice: the /i/ colored the /u/ before vanishing. norwegian and english both also underwent it, but both use entirely different letters to mark it, rather than a diacritic. this also means that calling the turkish and pinyin as umlauted vowels is wrong, since these are not known to have arisen via umlaut, though denying that they're borrowing the phonetic value of the grapheme as used in german would also be wrong. diaeresis refers to the splitting of two sounds. so for "naïve," it splits , which otherwise would create a word homophonous to "nave." and for "aigüe," it splits ; after and before , normally cancels palatalization, but in this word we want a silent after , so the trema marks diaeresis of . why can't they write it as aigu? because "aigu" is masculine and "aigüe" is feminine (it means "sharp"). why mark whether it's masculine or feminine if they're pronounced the same anyway? well, in classic poetry and singing, that is actually pronounced separately, as a schwa, and also i believe that at least one dialect of french distinguishes "aigu" /ɛgy/ from "aigüe" /ɛgyː/ in ordinary speech

[@rosiefay7283]

3:57 "Because who wants to write "re-enter", right?" Right! Doïng that would cause chaös.

[@hanzinhocheiriplays4781]

Portuguese used to have the same use for trema, but a orthographic reform chaged that, now we don't use such diacritic anymore, so you just have to know if a vowel combination is pronounced separatly or as a diphthong.

[@DonPaliPalacios]

Worst orthographic reform decision of all time, really. Trying to make the orthography simpler (in order to account for different language varieties with different spelling styles), they ended up making it more complicated and less transparent.

[@WILLIAN_1424]

Actually the use was limited for only syllables like "gue", "gui", "que" and "qui" whenever the "u" was pronunciated. But I agree, the reform makes no sense as the pronunciation stayed the same. Talvez nossos "lingüistas" eram muito preguiçosos para apertar shift+6 no teclado kkk

[@pewpew4545]

Wow I didn't even realise I was watching a small youtuber. This was brilliantly put together and highly engaging. When I started watching I thought I already knew abouts umlauts and diaereses but you engaged me to the point where I continued to watch and learn despite having convinced myself I already knew what you were going to talk about. AND the bit about the greek origins of the Diaereses was something I didn't know, which I will now never forget, and as you pointed out is **excellent** pedant material. Thank you so much for making this video, I'm sure if all of your content is to this standard you will explode in popularity any time now.

[@Manisphesto]

Sure the umlaut and the diaeresis are not the same. But I found some rare cases where the double dot doesn't function like the umlaut nor the diaeresis. For example this letter "ë" in Albanian (and a few other languages) makes the schwa sound. Another example is in the IPA, where it represents a centralised vowel like /ä/, /ɒ̈/, and even /ɪ̈/. (Yeah I searched for it in Wikipedia, but you get the point.)

[@dungdul4151]

I can't explain how much I like how you end videos. It feels full of impact.

[@Cosmioful]

In Danish it's perfectly valid to replace our Æ/æ, Ø/ø and Å/å with the "old long-spellings" of respectively ae, oe, and aa. This is used primarily when e.g. typing on foreign keyboards that don't contain the Danish characters, or filling in (foreign) forms that don't accept "special characters".

[@FlameRat_YehLon]

Pinyin has this as well. The official "non accented" Roman spelling of the sound for 女 is actually nyu, not nu. There are also geological locations that has official Roman spelling that is different from how it's spelled in Pinyin officially, namely, 陕西 is Shaanxi because Shanxi would mean 山西 (which pronounces the same but with different tone) instead, and also 西安 would be Xi'an because Xian would have a completely different pronunciation.

[@A._Meroy]

In German you can still use ae, oe and ue as well, but it is usually only done if ä, ö and ü are difficult to access or not available

[@Escviitash]

Correction: the long-spellings are not just "primarily used" in the situations mentioned, it is in fact the only situations where they are valid.

[@LucasM-SC]

In portuguese we had something like this to differnetiate sounds. Because in words like quente (hot; KEN-tih), we dont pronounce the u, but in words like frequente (frequent; fre-KWEN-tih*), we do, so the trema was used to diferentiate this words, like quente and freqüente. Unfortunately it was abolished in 2009. *The "r" is pronounced as the t in bouta (about to) in some diatects; /ɾ/

[@victorpaesplinio2865]

Brazilian portuguese used to have the diaeresis (called "trema") in many words. It was used over the u as ü to indicate a change of sound while using the letters g and q. For example, in the word "guisado" (stew) the "gui" is pronounced as in "given". But in the word "lingüiça" (sausage), the "güi" should be pronounced as in "penguin". An orthographic agreement from 1990 intended to standardize and simplify the Portuguese orthography. As a result of this, the "trema" was abolished entirely and it is not used anymore to indicate those differences in pronunciation. It means that even if you write "linguiça", you still pronounce it as in "penguin". To know when to pronounce the inexistent trema is a matter of practice now. Also, there are some word that allows both pronunciations, such as "liquido" (liquid) where you can pronounce either as in "liquid" or in "kit". The only exception for this rule is when it is used as the umlaut in foreign words like Müller.

[@ubernerd83]

I recently watched a video from another channel about umlauts where they talked about how English does in fact have words with umlauts, in the sense that a vowel has been fronted but doesn't have two dots to indicate this. Like in some irregular plurals like geese and mice.

[@daubert4892]

Before the correction of French orthography in 1990 the tréma was sometimes placed next to the vowel we were supposed to pronounce, hence the word « aigüe » was spelled « aiguë ». That was non-sense, so the reform was good. However was incomplete because the tréma is still missing on many words like « aiguille » and « linguiste » were the u must be pronounced but you can’t guess it!

[@azarias5666]

I don't entirely agree with the tréma on aiguille and linguiste because for me it's more pronounced "aigWille" than "aigUille" (same for linguiste) so the tréma would alter this pronunciation which might (that's my guess) come from this bizarre vowel-and-consonne aspect of the latin V (or u) which in this case take his consonne aspect by sounding /w/ and not /u/.

[@KasabianFan44]

@@azarias5666 I would argue that a hypothetical word pronounced “aigUille” could be spelt «aiguïlle», to contrast with «aigüille» which would be pronounced “aigWille”.

[@daubert4892]

@@azarias5666 Your pronounciation is non-standard. When the u is pronounced in gu, it is pronounced /y/ in front of e and i, and /w/ in front of /a/ and /o/. As a source you might want to check at your University's library Pierre Fouché "Traité de prononciation française", 1959 2de edition. So "güi" would be /gyi/ and "güa" would be /gwa/. If you want to say /gwi/ you must write something like "goui" like in the argot French word "gouine" for lesbian.

[@azarias5666]

@@KasabianFan44 (EDIT) I have just realised thank to daubert that I have a "wrong" (by french french standard) proununciation of aiguille so check his version too. But the actual gimmick of the tréma is to make a vowel sound like his "neutral" ("neutral" like "in the alphabet version of the vowel") pronunciation for example "aigüille" : the reader knows that this "u" is pronounced /y/ (because a "neutral" u is /y/ in french) but "aiguille" : the reader would imply that it's pronounced differently than a "neutral u" and by deduction guess that this "u" is pronouced /w/ (knowing a bit of french you can guess it fairly easily). On the other hand, "aiguïlle" would mean that the "i" is pronounced like /i/ but it's already the case in the word "aiguille" making the tréma here useless. But if we consider the rule before the reform of 1990, we would have put the tréma on the "i" to make the "u" change sound, like @daubert explained at the beginning with "aiguë" (before 1990) = "aigüe" (1990 onward) hence making "aiguïlle" (before 1990) = "aigüille" (1990 onward)

[@azarias5666]

@@daubert4892 Well that's weird because I always pronounce it "aigWille". Tough by checking the Wikitionnary, I've found that the "u" wasn't pronounced either /y/ nor /w/ but /ɥ/ like in "hUile" or "nUit". That explains a lot why I don't pronounce aiguille like you (I'm from Switzerland where (like Belgium) we tend to change that /ɥ/ into /w/). Problem solved, I guess ?

[@ThunderSmell]

Yet another video that shows me I can be interested in and care about things that I didn't before I clicked. Great video!!

[@Valery0p5]

2:57 English is responsible for the same sins, that's why some Nelson fanboy called her daughters Brontë instead of just Bronte, since you Britons would have spelled it _Bront_

[@Ch0rr1s]

Dude, i love your videos. really. i'm not really into languages and their heritage. But with small little topics like that, you're totally blowing my mind with knowledge that wont ever help me in my daily life - yet, its totally fascinating. thank you :)

[@Mystixor]

A little correction, in German ä, ö and ü are no longer considered a, o and u with accents (like é, à, ô with e, a, o in French) but they have become their own, separate letters. It doesn't really matter as we still don't mention them in the alphabet but I thought I'd clear up some confusion as you showed exactly this aspect for some other languages but German.

[@DadgeCity]

Dictionaries in different languages handle umlauts differently - some integrate them into the main letter, some treat them entirely separately.

[@rin_etoware_2989]

this sounds like another good idea to include in the diacretic study reform you made a while ago

[@ljr6490]

Lauts being ummed is my new favorite sentence

[@A._Meroy]

Let's umm some lauts... ;-)

[@theforgottendinosaur]

thank you for teaching me something I actually didn't know :D I have a goal to learn at least one new thing a day!

[@kaengurus.sind.genossen]

As a native German speaker and reader, I always have to actively adapt to not reading ä ö ü the way they are pronounced in German. I therefore appreciate it when French diacritics are dropped in English.

[@samizayed1126]

On a similar note, this reminds me of transcription in a general sense. Arabic words generally cannot be completely accurately transcribed into English using Latin letters, so when read them in English letters I generally read them as a foreigner would. (e.g. “Omar” would be read as it is written instead of the correct “ ‘umar)

[@Liggliluff]

But if French diacritics was used more often in English, you would instead get used to it. It's not like you pronounce "up" as /up/, or "dog" as /dɔk/

[@olasdorosdiliusimilius2174]

@@Liggliluff Yeah, but who tf wants more french in english?

[@quidam_surprise]

@@olasdorosdiliusimilius2174 Well then, go ahead ... Remove the *THIRD(ish)* English words of French origin present in the English lexicon out of your vocabulary and go back to calling people 'thou' since you scorn French so much ¯\🤨/¯

[@olasdorosdiliusimilius2174]

@@quidam_surprise Ok, ich werde dann gar nicht Englisch sprechen. Guter Tipp!

[@Android25K]

I knew about dieresis because I speak Spanish, but I didn't know about the umlaut. Still got a lot of information, plus I learned pingüino is pengüino now

[@jjkthebest]

What's funny is that Dutch, despite being closely related to German (and to a lesser extent to the Nordic languages) uses the trema but not the umlaut (except in one or two German loan words).

[@boium.]

föhn, überhaupt, fingerspitzengefühl, einzelgänger, glühwein. I looked up a list of german loan words and pick the ones with an umlaut that I know are used. Appart from fingerspitzengefühl, these are generally known words I would say.

[@rudigernassauer6075]

Unlike English Dutch has completely eradicated the Umlauten, so for instance the plural of man is mannen (in English men). I as a native German speaker See umlaut as nothing but a linguistic nuisance.

[@ruedigernassauer]

@@rudigernassauer6075 Autocorrection is bullshit!!! "umlaut", "see" To round up my note, "umlaut" exists only in remnants in English ("mouse, mice") and very excessivel y in German where it adds nothing to the content but only makes this language harder to learn. Let´s start a petition against "umlaut"!

[@yvesremy7096]

The case of French "aigue" is interesting as it shows a shift in spelling: when I was young, and even not so long ago still, the trema would be placed on the 2nd vowel to show it should be pronounced distinctly: aiguë - I think it's still the recommended spelling, but because a lot of people got confused, now the spelling aigüe is also accepted.

[@hachman2660]

Just to note and sort of add to the point of the video, the ukranian/rusyn Ï ï is not an I i with an umlaut or daeresis, instead its a iotated /i/ sound, therefore /ji/ (yee would be an english approximation). Fun fact: The Ï ï was in ukranian before I i, but the I i was later added and the two diverged into different sounds.

[@ppenmudera4687]

Fun fact: in Dutch we make frequent use of the trema to break up syllables. For example, _beëindigen_ 'to end something' consists of the word _eindigen_ 'to end' with the applicative prefix 'be-'. When put together you'd get 'beein-', which is unreadable, since represents the sound [e:], while the diphthong [ɛɪ], so what should be? Thus we use ë on the second e break up the syllables. Same with _kopiëren_ 'to copy' since represents [i:], but this word isn't /ko.'pi:.ren/, it's /ko.pi.'e:.ren/. Thus again ë to break the '-pie-' into two syllables. This can get kinda funky with plurals: the plural of _zee_ 'sea' is _zeeën_, with ë indicating that the last two letters form a separate syllable ['ze:.ən]. Without it it would be 'zeeen' which we would probably interpretate as an overlong vowel [e::] or something, which doesn't exist in Dutch

[@marcelreiter181]

Small sidenote: The "Um" in "Umlaut" can mean "around", too, which i find more logical than "in another way" (which i havn't heard before). E.g. "schauen" = looking, "umschauen" = "looking around" "fahren" = "driving", "umfahren" = "driving around [an obstacle]", or "driving over [something, e.g. a child]"

[@LordSmallest]

Why a child?

[@elmacho2789]

My reaction to that information: Ö

[@Grayson_Wu]

big mouth kirby

[@ieisha1976]

I'd just like to say I find these videos super interesting and I have learnt a lot about the history of different languages and countries. Thank you for making these!

[@laserpanda9553]

As an English speaker I've never spelt naive as naïve

[@falkelh]

Dude, I've seen every single video you've ever uploaded and I've loved them all. Keep up the good work, man!

[@damouze]

The umlaut actually also exists in other Germanic languages, even in English: man vs. men, woman vs. women, goose vs. geese, mouse vs. mice, etc, but also, for instance: to fall vs. to fell.

[@gwaptiva]

Underrated comment: we get so limited sometimes by orthography. It's the same when people say that German can use composition to make really long words, forgetting that English can do the same, does the same, just decides to put spaces between the parts when writing them (until the word becomes so common, it first becomes hyphenated and finally a single word)

[@rursus8354]

The umlaut in the video refers to the character diacritic, not the phonological phenomenon. Using umlaut the character to represent the phonological phenomenon, what would it be? Man/män, yeah possibly. Woman/womän or Woman/wömän? Goose/gööse? Mouse/möüse?

[@georgios_5342]

Very nice video! Diaeresis from dia (shows division) and haeresis (meaning "choice/destruction") it can either be inferred to "break down" a digraph or to "pick apart" the one letter they're put on to pronounce separately. The diaeresis/dialytika goes back to Ancient Greece (and indeed they're still used in Modern Greek in the same way) where there were many vowel digraphs that made separate sounds from the individual standalone letters they were made up from. The marking is one of the many in traditional Greek Polytonic script, but one of the only two that are still used in official Modern Greek (the other being the τόνος/tonos, a stress accent). PS, the modern Greek name, dialytika, means "those that destroy/break apart"

[@kakahass8845]

Now I'm wondering about Portuguese because we had "ü" but then a spelling reform decided that even though no one was complaining about it and it made spelling easier we should remove it.

[@javierlatorre480]

I mean, the people in charge of spelling reforms on Portuguese almost removed the accents outside of the last syllable a la Italian so I'm not surprised they made a bad decision here. Spanish still has it even though it shows up much less often since we changed the qüe qüi combinations into cue cui I think you should just keep writing the ü whenever you think it's appropriate, just to make a point

[@kakahass8845]

@@javierlatorre480 I heard the reason they changed it is because Portugal didn't use it so for some reason Brazil can't have it I mean it's not like some people write "Grey" as "Gray" it's completely unheard of to write things differently across the Atlantic anyway I will keep writing "ü" until the day I die and hopefully convince others to use it as well.

[@txikitofandango]

I'm so glad someone finally made this video. Thank you

[@LeventK]

In Turkish, we also have "ı" and "i".

[@ЮраН-ь2к]

Is "kızıl" and "kırmızı" the same color?

[@Copperhell144]

@@ЮраН-ь2к "Kırmızı" is red. "Kızıl" can mean red but in day to day speech is usually used to mean red-like/reddish.

[@francisdec1615]

In Swedish we have the letter Å. It's an ablaut of an Old Norse or Proto-Norse A. There is also a region in Italy where they have it, but it's of course not the same diacritic either.

[@pierreabbat6157]

The same diacritic occurs in Russian всё (all, n.sg.) vs. все (all, pl.), but there it's an ablaut (vowel change usually because of the position of the accent, not because of anticipating /i/ (which was later lost) or vowel harmony). Ë also occurs in Albanian, where it's just a different sound (a schwa), and I don't know what to call the diacritic, unless the general term is trema. In Aramaic, some centuries after Daniel, the plural definite of many nouns (/-aja/ in Daniel, later /-e/) and the singular definite (/-a/ began to be spelled the same (nequdot hadn't been invented yet), and they started writing two dots (called syame) on the plural. This diacritic is encoded as "combining dieresis" in Unicode, though it's distinct in origin from both the dieresis and the umlaut.

[@paulalexandre3358]

Many would say you miswrote “aiguë” in the examples, for the rule in French is that the “tréma” is always placed on the _second_ letter of a pair whose sounds we wish to separate. This is why you have “Noël,” “exiguë,” “ambiguïté,” etc. Alternate spellings have been introduced in 1990, but in this case I believe they just made French even more inconsistent because they destroyed an easy to understand and consistent rule, and generally made everything needlessly confusing. After all, you can now write “exigüe,” with the accent on the first letter, but good luck trying to pass of “näif,” or “äieux” as valid words. For once, I think it’s objectively better and more consistent to stick to the traditional spellings.

[@pkomelette4305]

No, it's more consistent now, because the tréma goes on the letter that becomes read where it normally wouldn't. It's not the silent e that changes in aigüe, it's the ü, not the i in ambigüité, but the u again.

[@mrrandom1265]

It actually makes sense: the tréma goes on the letter that should be pronounced: aigüe

[@paulalexandre3358]

@@mrrandom1265 I understand your reasoning, but I have to disagree. If it was on the letter that is pronounced, then why is it on the i but not the a of “naïf”? Both of them are pronounced even though they shouldn’t be. At least if it’s on the second letter there are no questions to ask.

[@PopeLando]

@@paulalexandre3358 It's the letter being pronounced separately that would otherwise not be pronounced on its own. The a in naïf would still be being part of the pronunciation of that word, but the i, unaccented, would make it sound like 'ey'. The umlaut makes you say "ah-ee", two separate sounds. Those 'u's after 'g' is normally to give the g a hard sound and not sound like j, but the u is not pronounced. It has the same job in Spanish (Italian uses h for this). Again the ü makes you make the oo sound that you otherwise wouldn't, as in Pingüino and Agüero. Note that Aguilera is pronounced "Aggy-lera".

[@b4ttlemast0r]

The point is that the trema now actually marks the vowel that is pronounced, which I think is much less confusing. When I see aiguë I would think that the e is pronounced and the u not, It doesn't fit with the way the diacritic is supposed to be used at all.

[@SpiritmanProductions]

Fascinating. More, please. Subscribed. ;-)

[@lohphat]

The New Yorker magazine famously continues to use the diaeresis in print to indicate a forced pronunciation of a vowel. E.g. coöperate - it’s not “koo-per-ate” as the “oo” would normally indicate but “ko-op-er-ate” It’s a bit pretentious but that’s their shtick anyway. Edit: Ha! I wrote the comment before they were mentioned at the end of the video.

[@mrgoldengraham027]

Man, your videos are so goddamn good. So clear and informative.

[@CloudyMcCloud00]

Cooperate used to be spelt "co-operate" -- and still is by those who know how to spell! Resist the Americanisation of British English! 💪

[@willguggn2]

To-day we shall co-operate!

[@francisdec1615]

The US spelling is more in line with how most Indoeuropean languages spell it. 'Kooperation' is the Swedish spelling of the noun, for instance, although the word is relatively rare.

[@CloudyMcCloud00]

@@francisdec1615 But we have the word "coop", from an entirely different area of meaning - and that is what we see with "cooperation". (In reply to the previous comment, "today", as opposed to "to-day", is different, as there are still two distinct syllables. Incidentally, there is a difference between a hyphen and a dash - despite the fact that the BBC seem intent on mixing them up too!)

[@Iknowknow112]

I really found this particular video very insightful! History can teach anything and everything that can be taught. History teaches not only the what and how but very often the why things are the way they are!

[@fab006]

In the German story, it’s crucial to realize that “e” in German handwriting looked much like “n”. The two dots derive from two downstrokes.

[@musicaloats]

very interesting, especially as two downstrokes rather than two dots are still used in handwriting to this day

[@xCorvus7x]

What handwriting do you mean?

[@HeadsFullOfEyeballs]

@@xCorvus7x Sütterlin, for the most recent example. But basically any German cursive script before the 20th century works that way.

[@xCorvus7x]

@@HeadsFullOfEyeballs Before the 20th century? So modern cursive is different for some reason?

[@tomgottwald8690]

@@xCorvus7x Yes there was a dispute over what script to use, the rounded latin script or the broken(referring to the style not that it's bad) German script. It was ultimately decided by the Nazis that only the rounded script should be taught in schools.

[@uitham]

In dutch its also used as diaresis, usually when -en is added in plurals: idee, ideeën (three vowels!). but: bacterie, bacteriën

[@DaHitch]

As a Flemish Belgian I've had trouble explaining to my German and Finnish friends how the trema we use in Dutch is different from their umlaut, and why I consider it an accent mark rather than their interpretation of it being a wholly separate letter. (which makes no sense, the alphabet has 26 letters, fight me) I'm definitely sending them this video. :D

[@pikasnoop6552]

However, we have the nasty habbit of writing what really is a letter on its own as two letters ("oe", "ui", "ij", etc.). I am not sure our way is better. Hell, "ij" is sometimes counted as one letter (e.g. the capitalization in "IJsland" or in crossword puzzels), however that might be different in Flemish compared to Dutch.

[@FeeshUnofficial]

Correction: the *Latin* alphabet has 26 letters

[@FeeshUnofficial]

@@pikasnoop6552 ij technically is it's own letter, even. It's really fucky. The Dutch alphabet is a really strange variation on the Latin one where it just adds a single letter... Sort of. It's its own letter but not really. Either way, ij is technically different from ij

[@donidemaru5547]

The trema is also used in Dutch, with words like drieëntwintig and vacuüm

[@TotalTimoTime]

Angry german noises: äöü are seperate letters in german as well >:(

[@kklein]

ahaha yes I mean they have been declared separate letters... but they are often also thought about as, for example, "a+umlaut" I believe - or at least that's what I was taught :)

[@TotalTimoTime]

Yep, i think it’s both. I was taught the same but our alphabet in primary school definitely had the 3 extra letters. And then another section for ß, sch, st, and sp. Germans are weird :)

[@xCorvus7x]

@@TotalTimoTime An addendum with certain variations of the letters mentioned before is sensible. Why should everyone figure out on their own for what sound sch stands, or conversely how to denote that sound?

[@KasabianFan44]

Are they _really_ separate letters in German though? Because you don’t give these letters their own places in the alphabet - if you want to look up a word with an umlaut in a dictionary, you just ignore the diacritic, as if it’s NOT a separate letter. By contrast, in many other languages like Polish, these letters are completely separated from their base letters in the alphabet (for example, Ś comes directly after S, which means “kosz” comes BEFORE “kościół” in the dictionary). So as a Polish speaker, I would personally argue that you don’t… separate?… your umlauted letters quite enough to unambiguously say that they’re their own letters (but that is just my interpretation).

[@xCorvus7x]

@@KasabianFan44 Yeah, that's it. They aren't really separate letters but variants which to name additionally is sensible. You can't really expect children growing up or foreigners learning German to re-invent the linguistic development of how the umlaut sounds have come to be denoted, or what sounds have come to be denoted by this diacritic; can you? There are only five vowels in the Latin alphabet, so the list of all umlauts is pretty short anyway. Some older dictionaries actually treat the umlauts as ae/oe/ue, so e.g. „Köcher“ is treated as „Koecher“ and accordingly comes after „Kodierung“ while „König“ comes before „Kommunismus“.

[@morefiction3264]

That was good. You covered a couple of things I was always curious about: the origins of the umlaut, and why naive sometimes has those marks.

[@davidguerin6142]

"They are written identically in all writing styles" well... Speaking for German and French, they are sometimes written quite differently, in German it is often made with two vertical lines, and I know people who combine the two lines in a sort of tilde, while in French it is generally made with two dots. Maybe these are just different handwriting styles? Sure, but in my very small sample size of personal writing styles in German and French there is quite a difference. Maybe it is because lines are easier to write than dots and the umlaut is much more common on German than the diaeresis in French? Maybe it is a remnant of the old gothic (Fraktur, Sütterlin) scripts with lines, not dots?

[@RoteZoraFranz]

My umlaut is often a horizontal line in handwriting

[@MojnMojn]

@@RoteZoraFranz when i write swedish i do ä and ö with a line instead of dots since it's faster lol

[@KaiKunstmann]

I once learned, that you shouldn't use contractions, if the to-be-contracted auxiliary verb is the main verb of the sentence (with a few exceptions like "It's alright!"). I'm referring to the "aren''t" in the title and thumbnail here. It seems unnatural to contract "[they] are not" to "[they] aren't" in this complete (half-)sentence.

[@ruedigernassauer]

Simply forget that rule, it´s false.

[@raisage]

Simply wonderful, thank you so much for the explanation!

[@mandoleg]

Can we just take a moment to appreciate how masterfully Also Me edited this video.

[@rfvtgbzhn]

1:55 from what I know these digraphs where one letter is above the other where done to reduce the amount of space needed for writing, effectively reducing the numbers of pages needed for a book to make it cheaper, especially after the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg in 1440, because unlike in handwritten books where labour was the main cost factor, for printed books it was the number of pages.

[@JF-wp2rz]

I worked in an archive (in Austria) last year and interestingly, I have seen the letters ä, ö and ü writte with an e above a, o or u respectively quite often. Keep in mind that these documents were not very old (the oldest document I worked with was written around 1840). Actually, I had seen it most often in documents from the first half of the 20th century (alongside the nowadays common variants), but in documents written after the 50s I never saw it written like that.

[@mapu1]

As person tired of silent english letters, you should bring that stuff back. Maybe then i could actually pronounce words with letter H in them.

[@roggeralves94]

Brazilian Portuguese used to have the diaeresis (like in Spanish) but it was abolished in the newest spelling reform. "Penguin" used to be "pingüim" but now it's "pinguim". Now there is no way to know if the 'u' should be pronounced or not (if you're a foreigner learning Portuguese, for example). I liked it with the diaeresis better...

[@ruedigernassauer]

You´re right, unlike the elimination of the silent letters "p" and "c" (from "acção, opção to "ação, oção") in Brazilian Portuguese, this new spelling rule was complete bullshit.

[@roggeralves94]

@@ruedigernassauer I'm not the biggest fan either, but in general I don't care too about the spelling reform, since at least in Brazilian Portuguese not that many words were affected. The words that still stand out to me as weird are "voo" (it used to be "vôo") and "micro-ondas" (it used to be "microondas"). They still look so wrong whenever I read them. Regarding "opção" and "ação", let me point out just some small things: the "p" in "opção" is not silent in either Brazilian or European Portuguese, so the word is still written with a "p". As for "ação", the 1990 reform has only affected the way this word is written in Portugal, since the silent "c" had already been abolished in 1943 in Brazil. Cheers.

[@jLjtremblay]

Yeah, our reform in French is mostly ignored by us Canadians, so I understand what you say. (Adoro o portugues!)

[@roggeralves94]

@@jLjtremblay j'adore le français aussi !

[@feliad6401]

As a native French speaker. Thou,, first of all, taught me the difference between the two letters but more importantly, thou taught me why I use it in French 🤣. I had never thought about it until now ! Anyway, great video and explanation. Keep it up !

[@yorktown99]

There is a third variant, which sort of exists as both an umlaut and a diaeresis, yet is distinct from either one: Ukrainian (and a handful of other, less widely-spoken Slavic languages) uses і and ї, written in majuscule form as І and Ї. Ukrainian treats these as completely separate letters, yet the history of the orthography seems to indicate both a digraph (of the i and e) and a diaeresis (indicating that it should form a fully-pronounced syllabic shift).

[@bennythetiger6052]

In portuguese, we used to have ü to show the difference in pronunciation of words that contained "qui" /ki/ or "qüi" /kwi/, for example. Unfortunately, ever since the last reform of portuguese ortography, it is considered obsolete by the council responsible for ruling the portuguese language in the territories where it is spoken. The fact is, since such remastering is still quite recent, a lot of people - especially the elderly - will default to using the ü. It is sad that it was taken out since it really helped to know which pronunciation should be used, but allegedly it "did not impact in the meaning of most words where the conflicting pronunciations can be found", which personally I don't think is an excuse at all. In fact, most people who pay attention to this detail will say it is far better when we were still using it and that it'd be good to have it back.

[@stooge_mobile]

Um this is really good gear. Channel growth imminent.

[@Minielein97]

Thanks for that video! Thats all good to know! And I loved the music in the end! Can you make a longer video with simple music like this, it's quite relaxing and inspiring :)

[@shrimpfry880]

0:20 i'm hungarian and i've always looked at them as modified letters (edit: even though they are treated as individual letters). if you take a look at the hungarian alphabet you'll know why

[@vvvvaaaacccc]

the music is very pleasant! well done all around.

[@jonashotger4456]

It's worth it to take a look at the examples at 2:26 again: two lines/dots aren't just the most convenient symbol people could come up with. In old German cursive, the e is basically two such lines, but connected in a cursive way. Quite similar to an angular n. The example word given is "schön", with the letter looking like v being the o.