Chris Dolan wrote:
On a major tangent, have others noticed the resurgence of the umlaut in printed English? I keep seeing things like coöperation or coördinates -- particularly in Technology Review, but in other publications on occasion too. Is that because it's *supposed* to be spelled that way, but ASCII and the typewriter have suppressed that spelling for my lifetime?
A quick use of Google-fu unearthed a blog entry http://www.dwelle.org/archives/2007/01/05/whats-with-all-the-umlauts/, which in turn pointed to the page http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/profirst/d.htm that says:
*dieresis* or *diæresis *A diacritical mark (* ¨ *) optionally used in English, oftentimes replaced by a hyphen. In English, the dieresis is used on a second identical vowel to indicate a change in pronunciation of that vowel or indicate it is pronounced in a separate syllable. It is sometimes referred to as an « umlaut » when used with a single character or in a « diphthong. » Examples: reëlecting, reëncoding, coöperation, coördination.
Well I, for one, never knew that such a thing existed. Neato! Too bad the name of the mark, though, which is definitively unfortunate.
Joÿ, `/anick
