48
votes
Accepted
What does 'ü' mean in song titles?
It’s the metal umlaut invading other genres of music.
Briefly, in the seventies, metal bands started adding diereses (and other diacritical marks) to their names or song titles to look mean, German, ...
- 4,394
36
votes
Accepted
Usage of diacritics in loanwords
The consensus is... there is no consensus. In fact, some of the style guides I checked didn't even mention it. In that case you can just use the spelling recommended by a dictionary. That's what The ...
- 67.3k
28
votes
Accepted
What is the difference between a dieresis and an umlaut?
Bryan Garner, Garner's Modern American Usage, second edition (2003) offers the following succinct discussion of the two punctuation marks (which are really one punctuation mark with two different ...
- 169k
15
votes
Why does English omit diacritics on foreign names?
I, an ignorant, lazy, hubristic, and (most-importantly) impatient American, need to add this preface, so I will have enough letters for this to be counted as an answer.
One word:
Keyboard
Please, ...
- 701
15
votes
Usage of diacritics in loanwords
I do not think that garçon/garcon is an ideal example, as it is seldom used as an English word (i.e. it is generally only used only to refer to a French individual). A better loan-word with a cedilla ...
- 13k
13
votes
Accepted
Did Old English have diacritics?
The diacritic on "ē" (the horizontal line called a "macron") does not represent Old English spelling. It is part of a modern standardized system for writing Old English words. It's useful to have such ...
- 84.5k
11
votes
What is the difference between a dieresis and an umlaut?
According to the Wikipedia article for dieresis, the dieresis is used to indicate that two vowels are to be pronounced separately, rather than combined as a single combined sound. On the other hand, ...
- 973
9
votes
Usage of diacritics in loanwords
There's also the curious case of foreign words that normally wouldn't get diacriticals, but sometimes do in order to distinguish them from their English look-alikes. For example, the Japanese word ...
- 356
8
votes
What does 'ü' mean in song titles?
The double-dot-over can be either an umlaut or a diaresis. The umlaut signifies a different (often longer) vowel in German. The diaresis signifies that a vowel begins a new syllable.
As an umlaut, it ...
- 2,636
7
votes
Accepted
What is the symbol connecting the letters "c" and "t" called, and when did it go out of style?
As Xanne notes in a comment beneath the posted question, the generic name for a joined two-letter typed character such as ct in the image above is ligature. Writing in response to essentially the same ...
- 169k
6
votes
What is the distinction between “role” and “rôle” [with a circumflex]?
Rôle was the standardised spelling used in the UK parliament until a few decades ago, see
Google: "rôle" site:theyworkforyou.com and is still used on The Public Whip for column headers.
The circumflex ...
- 1,008
5
votes
Accepted
Was the use of accents in -ed adjectives ever common-place? When were they first used in modern books?
First, for some historical context - accent grave (è) comes from Ancient Greek, and was part of a system developed for marking intonation. When the language moved to a stress-based system, the ...
- 41.7k
5
votes
Accepted
Why are diacritics used in words that apparently don't need them? Is it some sort of poetic license?
Hopkins was an advocate of sprung rhythm, and many of his poems are written in it. (Others are written in conventional poetic meters.) In Hopkins' sprung rhythm, every line has the same number of ...
- 90.3k
5
votes
Why does English omit diacritics on foreign names?
In a note appended to the question, the OP says 'I am only talking about names using the Latin alphabet, I am not talking about transliterated names'. This implies that the OP regards it as ...
- 8,928
5
votes
What is the difference between a dieresis and an umlaut?
The simplest summary is: Umlaut is a German phenomenon, while dieresis is used mostly in French (see examples above).
At a closer look they look similar but convey totally different meanings: Dieresis ...
- 51
5
votes
What accent can I put on "u" to make it sound like "you"?
The problem you have is that readers pronounce a strange name the way they think it should be pronounced. No amount of accents will fix that.
Accents are pretty meaningless to the average English ...
- 46.5k
4
votes
How come in English we don't put symbols above our letters to change how they are pronounced?
We do in a way; it's just that our letters with bits added above and below them have come to be considered separate letters.
The same happened in Swedish, where "ä", "ö" and "å" are considered ...
- 3,381
4
votes
Accepted
Where should one place word division dots in "Schroedinger" (with "oe" instead of "ö")?
The division Schrö·ding·er would most naturally suggest Schroe·ding·er. I can think of no reason to divide Schroedinger as Schro-edinger. I find it a little curious that the question even comes up. ...
- 84.5k
3
votes
Is there an equivalent of diaeresis, but for consonants?
No, there is no special dieresis mark for consonants.
In your question, it seems to me that you have already excluded all of the most likely ways of marking that a sequence of "consonant letters&...
- 84.5k
3
votes
Was the use of accents in -ed adjectives ever common-place? When were they first used in modern books?
Let's take moved for our example. When Shakespeare wrote, both the two-syllable pronunciation, /muvəd/, and the one-syllable pronunciation /muvd/ were in use. He used whichever would make his verse ...
- 90.3k
3
votes
What is the difference between a dieresis and an umlaut?
Other answers have addressed the question pretty well in a general context, so I thought I'd give an answer focussing more on the linguistic history in particular
In this context, the diacritic is not ...
- 864
2
votes
“Zoe” or “Zoë”: which is the correct spelling?
I have a 6 month old daughter named Zoé.
We’re right in the middle of that discussion and I thought the internet would sort it out. Instead I found this question.
I was born in France, so to me it’s ...
- 195
2
votes
"Naïve" yet "naivety"?
The difference could arise because naïve is a direct loan word from French, but naivety is an English word adapted from the original French naïveté.
- 12k
2
votes
"Naïve" yet "naivety"?
There isn’t really any standard for the use of the trema in English, so I don’t think there is any deep “why” to the behavior of this spell-checker. As mentioned in the comments, “naivety” has an ...
- 84.5k
2
votes
Using diacritics
English doesn't much use diacritics, but many folks do learn as schoolchildren (at least in the US) that a breve ˘ over a vowel means a "short" vowel, and a macron ¯ means a long vowel1. Pharaoh is ...
- 22.9k
2
votes
Usage of diacritics in loanwords
Dropping diacritics from written English has become much more common in more recent times and I suspect it will continue to trend that way, largely because adding accents is a pain on a standard ...
- 1,911
2
votes
Accepted
Can there be a circonflex on a "w" in Welsh?
Yes, the circumflex exists in the Welsh spelling:
Circumflex In Welsh :
The circumflex is known as hirnod "long sign" or acen grom "crooked accent", but more usually and colloquially as to bach ...
- 68.1k
2
votes
Accepted
What is the name of this type of mark?
It's a stylised underline. From Wikipedia...
The practice of underlined (or doubly underlined) superscripted abbreviations was common in 19th-century writing.
- 142k
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