> 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

  1. the two points, aka diaresis or trema (Anglo-Saxons)
  2. the vowels ä,ö,ü (Germans)
  3. 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.

In reply to Re^3: incorrect length of strings with diphthongs by LanX
in thread incorrect length of strings with diphthongs by tos

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