Re^2: incorrect length of strings with diphthongs

"Diphthong" may be a thinko for "diacritic."

And the Unicode Consortium calls those two dots a "diaresis." A German umlaut looks the same, but has the function, more or less, of appending an "e" to the marked vowel. A diaresis, in languages I know that use it (English and Spanish) is placed over the second vowel to indicate that it is not participating in a diphthong but pronounced separately. They seem to be much less used these days in English, but in times past you wrote "coöperate" to indicate that the word was "co-op-er-ate", not "coop-er-ate."

Sorry for the grammar pedantry, but on the chance the OP was not a native English speaker I thought I would try to clarify the terminology, even though we all know what you meant.

Comment on Re^2: incorrect length of strings with diphthongs

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Re^3: incorrect length of strings with diphthongs by LanX (Saint) on Aug 27, 2022 at 20:37 UTC
> A German umlaut looks the same, but has the function, more or less, of appending an "e" to the marked vowel. Less or more, there are three things called Umlaut the two points, aka diaresis or trema (Anglo-Saxons) the vowels ä,ö,ü (Germans) the phonetic phenomen (Liguists) see Umlaut_(disambiguation) Umlauts in German were originally denoted by a superscript e written above and the small e degraded to two points². But that doesn't mean appending an e in the sense of a diphthong. The Proto-Germanic words for "foot/feet" (DE: Fuß/Füße) was something like "fōts/fōtiz" without sound alteration of the first vowel. At some point people where too lazy and assimilated the back-vowel "u" to the following "i", i.e. the mouth and lips still formed "oo" while pronouncing "ee". Cheers Rolf _{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :) Wikisyntax for the Monastery} drivel ... Interestingly does the tendency to pronounce the "ü" that way seem to depend on European regions, the French and Dutch pronunciation of "u" is pretty much like the German "ü", eastern European varieties of German especially Yiddish lose them again ("Fis" or "Fisle"° for "feet") °) where the "le" is a diminutive characteristic for South-German dialects, compare "Müesli" from Switzerland, interestingly with a "üe" diphthong which doesn't exist in Standard German. Germans will say "Müsli" which in turn means "little Mouse" in Swiss-German xD ²) or two vertical bars. The "e" in Kurrent looks similar to '11', no idea why.	[reply]
Re^3: incorrect length of strings with diphthongs by hippo (Archbishop) on Aug 26, 2022 at 21:48 UTC
They seem to be much less used these days in English, but in times past you wrote "coöperate" I am a native speaker of English and have to agree that they are not seen as much as previously. I put this down to very poor support for any sort of accents in word-processing software aimed at the English-speaking market up until maybe 10 years ago. However, I must also say that I don't recall ever seeing a diaeresis in coöperate, although plenty of times I have seen it with a hyphen to obtain the same effect, ie. "co-operate". Some words still look strange to me when I see them unadorned such as: Noël, naïve, Zoë, etc. Perhaps that too will fade with time. 🦛	[reply]
Re^3: incorrect length of strings with diphthongs by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Aug 27, 2022 at 00:17 UTC
What hippo said. I write résumé, naïve, piñon, façade, antennæ, and such because I’m a typographer by past trade and have always used Macs where it’s easy to find such things. I don’t remember ever seeing “coöperate,” even in historical text.	[reply]
Re^3: incorrect length of strings with diphthongs by tos (Deacon) on Aug 29, 2022 at 10:25 UTC
"Diphthong" may be a thinko for "diacritic.", that was my unforgivable fault. ;-) But therefore i learned the neat new word "thinko". :-) Is simplicity best or simply the easiest Martin L. Gore	[reply]

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