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Umlaut (diacritic)
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Ä ä
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Ü ü

The word ''umlaut'' is used to refer to the Diacritic al mark composed of two small dots placed over a vowel ( '''¨''' ) to indicate the phonological phenomenon of Umlaut in German, and in several other languages which have borrowed the symbol from German. The umlauts are ä , ö , and ü .

This should be distinguished from the similar Diacritic mark ( ¨ ), placed over a vowel (In the case of an ''i'', it replaces the original dot) to indicate Diaeresis , the lack of a diphthong in other languages (e.g. coöperate, pronounced as four syllables , not ), also called '''''diaeresis''''', or '''''trema'''''. In professional Typography , the umlaut dots are usually a bit closer to the letter's body than the diaeresis dots, while in handwriting, and in most computer screen fonts, no difference is made.
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The need to distinguish between Umlaut and Trema in Unicode has led to the following recommendation by ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 2, for use only in cases where a need to distinguish between umlaut and trema is present:

  • To represent Trema use Combining Grapheme Joiner (CGJ, 034F) + Combining Diaeresis (0308)

  • To represent Umlaut use Combining Diaeresis (0308)



HISTORY


Originally, umlaut was denoted in written German by adding an ''e'' to the affected vowel, either after the vowel or, in small form, above it. (In medieval German manuscripts, other handwriting as used in German manuscripts of the later Middle Ages, and also in many printed texts of the early modern period, the superscript still had a form which would be recognisable to us as an . However, in the forms of handwriting which emerged in the early modern period (of which Sütterlin is the latest and best known example), the letter had two strong vertical lines, and the superscript looked like two tiny strokes. Gradually these strokes were reduced to dots, and as early as the 16th century we find this handwritten convention being transferred sporadically to printed texts too.


PRINTING CONVENTIONS IN GERMAN

When typing German, if umlaut letters are not available, the proper way is to replace them with the underlying vowel and a following . So, for example, "Schröder" becomes "Schroeder". As the pronunciation differs greatly between the normal letter and the umlaut, simply omitting the dots is considered incorrect and irritates native speakers. The result might often be a different word, and in fact sentences can be constructed where the meaning would change, for example "Der Hauptmann gab den Soldaten Stützen/Stutzen", in English: "The captain gave the soldiers supports/short rifles.". Another example of incorrect practice is referring to Düsseldorf (named after the river Düssel, a tributary of the Rhine ) as ''Dusseldorf'', which literally means ''dimwit village''.

Despite this, the umlauted letters are not considered part of the alphabet proper. When Alphabetically Sorting German words, the umlaut is treated like the underlying vowel; if two words differ only by an umlaut, the umlauted one comes second, for example:

# Schon
# Schön
# Schonen

There's a second system in use, mostly for sorting names (colloquially called "telephone directory sorting"), which treats ü like ue, and so on. Austria n telephone directories insert ü after uz.

In Switzerland , capital umlauts are sometimes printed as Digraph s, in other words, , , , instead of <Ä>, <Ö>, <Ü>. (See German Alphabet for an elaboration.) This is because the swiss keyboard also contains the french accents on the same buttons as the umlauts (chosen by Shift). To write capital umlauts swiss people have to activate Caps Lock for a second.


BORROWING OF GERMAN UMLAUT NOTATION

Some languages have borrowed some of the forms of the letters Ä , Ë , Ï , Ö , or Ü , for example Spanish , Estonian , Finnish , Hungarian , Karelian , the Sami Languages , Slovak and Turkish . For example, Estonian alphabet has borrowed <ä>, <ö> and <ü> from German, Finnish has <ä> and <ö>, Slovak has <ä> and Turkish has <ü> and <ö>. These characters are not umlauts because they are not a result of the phonological process of umlaut, even if they denote similar sounds to the German ones. Consequently, they are considered independent graphemes, and may not be replaced with , , or as in German. In Estonian and Finnish, for example, these latter diphthongs have independent meanings. Even some Germanic languages such as Swedish treat them as independent letters. In Collation , this means they have their own positions in the alphabet, for example at the end ("A–Ö", not "A–Z") as in Swedish and Finnish, which means that the dictionary order is different from German.

The Estonian, Finnish and Sami languages use <ä> and <ö> to denote and . Hungarian, on the other hand, has <ü>, and <ö>. The Slovak Language uses the letter <ä> to denote (or a bit archaic but still correct ) — the sign is called ''dve bodky'' ("two dots"), and the full name of the letter ''ä'' is ''a s dvomi bodkami'' ("a with two dots"). Swedish has <ä> and <ö>, and there is similar alteration between and with /ä/.

This usage of umlauted letters, particularly ''ü'', also occurs in the transcription of languages that do not use the Roman alphabet, such as Chinese . For example, 女 (meaning ''female'') is transcribed as ''nü''.

By analogy with umlaut, various scripts including the International Phonetic Alphabet place two dots above other letters. In Dutch,the Letter IJ is sometimes written Ÿ/ÿ, but this is not a standard use. Ÿ is more used as a "jå", as in información, writed informacÿn.

Jacaltec , a Maya n dialect, and Malagasy are the only languages to allow a pair of dots over the letter "n", which is presented in unicode as " N̈ ".

In Albanian , two dots over 'e' represent a Schwa and in Luxembourgish (''Lëtzebuergesch''), a stressed schwa. Since the Luxembourgish language uses the mark to show stress, it cannot be used to modify the 'u' which therefore has to be 'ue'.

As such uses do not mark grammatical variation, i.e. of Tense or Mood , nor syllable modification, they are not properly cases of umlaut. Hence it is improper to call these characters ''umlauts'' and they are better referred to as ''trema''.


DIAERESIS

In Greek , French , Dutch and Afrikaans , the Diaeresis is expressed by putting the diaresis mark or ''trema'' over the second of the two adjacent vowels, as in the (Greek) names ''Chloë'' and ''Zoë''.
The term ''trema'', as the diacritical symbol itself, is taken from Medieval Greek Byzantine orthography, τρημα, meaning "perforation, orifice".

Use of the diaeresis mark has fallen out of use in contemporary English; it was often applied to English words of Latin origin (as in ''coöperate'', ''reënact''), and more rarely in native English words (''noöne''), but this usage has become extremely rare by since the 1940s . '' The New Yorker '', '' The Economist '' and MIT's '' Technology Review '' can be noted as some of the few publications that spell ''coöperate'' with a diaeresis. Dutch retains more frequent use of the diacritic, compare, for example, ''coëfficiënt'' in Dutch vs. ''coefficient'' in English.

Welsh also uses the diacritic for this purpose, with the diaeresis usually indicating the stressed vowel. French also uses the diaeresis to indicate syllabification in, for example, ''Gaëlle'' and ''païen''. It is called ''trema'' or ''deelteken'' in Dutch, ''tréma'' in French.

In s for Verb s). So, a word can be distinguished by the use (or not) of diaereses. Examples includes ''saiamos'' ( Subjunctive Present ) and ''saïamos'' ( Imperfect Present ), and other verbs with Infinitive s, ended with (''oír'', "to listen"), ''-aer'' (''caer'', "to fall"), ''-oer'' (''moer'', "mill"), ''-air'' (''saír'', "to go out"), ''-oir'' and so on.

Ÿ can be used in transcribed αυ (alpha upsilon), e.g. in the Persian name ''Artaÿctes'' at the very end of Herodotus . Ÿ is also rarely found in French in certain proper nouns (for instance, the name of the Paris ian suburb of L'Haÿ-les-Roses ). In addition, Ÿ occurs in handwritten Dutch as a glyph variant of the letter IJ .


IN CYRILLIC

Diaeresis was used in the Early Cyrillic Alphabet which was used to write Old Church Slavonic . The modern Cyrillic Belarusian and Russian Alphabet s include the letter Yo (Ё, ё), although in modern Russian it is usually printed without the diaeresis (Е, е) unless doing so would create ambiguity. Since the 1870s, the letter Yi (Ї, ї) has been used in the Ukrainian Alphabet . The Rusyn Alphabet uses both Ё,Ї and also ÿ for the "ü" sound

The Cyrillic Alphabet letters A , O and U (А, О, У) with diaeresis have been used in the Altay , Mari and Keräşen Tatar Alphabet s for the sounds ''ä'', ''ö'', ''ü'' since the 19th century. In the Udmurt Language , the diaeresis is also used with the consonant letters Zhe (Ж, ж → , ) and Ze (З, з → , ).


IN COMPUTING

It is imperative that umlaut characters be available on the keyboard for writing languages that use them. It is very difficult to use any special key sequences, especially if the umlaut character is not considered a modification but an independent grapheme. In practice, the computer must be configured to use an appropriate keyboard layout.


Entering umlauts in HTML

can also be seen.]]
Most character encodings treat the umlaut as the same diacritic mark as the Diaeresis . In HTML , vowels with umlauts or diaereses can be entered with an entity reference of the form &?uml;, where ? can be any of a, e, i, o, u, y or their Majuscule counterparts. With the exception of the uppercase ''Ÿ'', these characters are also available in all of the ISO 8859 character sets and thus have the same codepoints in ISO-8859-1 ( -2 , -3 , -4 , -9 , -10 , -13 , -14 , -15 , -16 ) and Unicode . The uppercase ''Ÿ'' is available in ISO 8859-15 and Unicode, and Unicode provides a number of other letters with the diaeresis as well (see Diaeresis#How To Produce The Characters On Computers ).










Entering umlauts via special key sequences

On several operating systems, umlaut characters can be written even without the current keyboard layout having umlaut characters by entering Alt Codes . On Microsoft Windows Keyboard Layout s that do not have umlaut characters, one can especially use Windows Alt Keycodes . Umlauts then are entered by pressing the left Alt key, and entering the full decimal value of the character's position in the Windows Code Page on the numeric keypad, provided that the compatible code page is used as a system code page. You can also use numbers from Code Page 850 ; these lack a leading 0.

On a computer running MacOS umlauts can be entered be pressing option-u, followed by the vowel to have an umlaut above it.
X-based Systems with the Compose Key can usually enter umlauted characters by typing Compose, " followed by the letter.

The ISO 8859-1 character encoding includes the letters ''ä'', ''ë'', ''ï'', ''ö'', ''ü'', and their respective Capital forms, as well as ''ÿ'' in Lower Case only (''Ÿ'' was added in the revised edition, ISO 8859-15 ). Dozens of more letters with the diaeresis are available in Unicode . Unicode also provides the diaeresis as a Combining Character U+0308. Unicode treats the umlaut as the same diacritic mark as diaeresis, and does not encode separate characters for the same letter with umlaut and with diaeresis. In those cases where umlauts must be distinguished from diaeresis, the special character ''U+034F COMBINING GRAPHEME JOINER (CGJ)'' can be used:
:For diaeresis: X + CGJ + COMBINING DIAERESIS (e.g. )
:For umlauts: X + COMBINING DIAERESIS (e.g. )
It is then up to the User Agent and Typeface being used to provide meaningful distinction between the two characters.

The HTML Entities for these characters all end in ''uml''; e.g. &auml; = ä. These entities however use the Unicode diaeresis codepoints when rendered.

TeX also allows double dots to be placed over letters in math mode, using "\ddot{}", or outside of math mode, with the \" control sequence:
: \mathrm{\ddot{a}\ddot{b}\ddot{c}\ddot{d}\ddot{e}\ddot{A}\ddot{B}\ddot{C}\ddot{D}\ddot{E}}

However this will give the diaeresis-style dots that are too far above the letter's body for good typographical umlauts. TeX's "german" package should be used if possible: it adds the " control sequence (without backslash) which gives nice umlauts.

On the Apple Macintosh , the diaeresis is produced with the keystroke Option+U, followed by the character to receive the diaeresis.

Using Microsoft Word , the diaeresis is produced by pressing Ctrl+Shift+:, then the letter.


TIME DERIVATIVES IN MATHEMATICS

The Derivative with respect to time is often represented as a dot above a variable. Two dots represents the second derivative.

:{\dot{a}} = {\mathrm{d} \over \mathrm{d}t} a

:{\ddot{a}} = {\mathrm{d} ^2 \over \mathrm{d} t^2} a

This may be contrasted with the more common notation for a derivative using a Prime :

:f'(x) = {\mathrm{d} \over \mathrm{d}x} f(x)

:f''(x) = {\mathrm{d}^2 \over \mathrm{d} x^2} f(x)

In Physics , a dot typically represents a (partial) time derivative \mathrm d \over \mathrm d t while a prime represents a spatial derivative \mathrm d \over \mathrm d x.


USE OF THE DIACRITIC FOR SPECIAL EFFECTS

The umlaut diacritic can be used in "sensational spellings", for example in advertising, or for other special effects.

As the German short ''a'' is more open than the equivalent sound in English (''/æ/''), Germans sometimes use the diacritic ''ä'' to imitate the English sound in writing, giving an English "feel" to words used in advertising; in a McDonald's restaurant in Germany one can buy a " Big Mäc ".

Since the letter ''ü'' is very common in Turkish, its inappropriate use can make a text in another language look "turkified", a purely visual mimicry. Because of the large number of Turks living in Germany, this again is a phenomenon familiar in German. The Turkish-German satirist Osman Engin , for example, wrote a book entitled ''Dütschlünd, Dütschlünd übür üllüs'' - the opening line of the former German National Anthem , but turkified!

In the Heavy Metal scene, the umlaut diacritic can frequently be observed as a mere decoration (with no significance for the pronunciation) on the names of bands such as Motörhead . The fictitious group Spinal Tap places an umlaut over the N. An interestingly self-referential example is the Finnish group Ümlaut . See the main article Heavy Metal Umlaut .


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