Talk:Germanic umlaut

message: Perhpas a list of keyboard shortcuts might be included at the end of the page to help those typing?
:On Macs (OS X, American keyboard layout) it is done by holding down the ALT key and pressing u (which gives you the diaeresis) and then the vowel.
:For Windows: Hold down ALT and type on the number keyboard on the right side:</br>
:132 = ä</br>
:148 = ö</br>
:129 = ü</br>
:For more codes check here: http://www.tcp-ip-info.de/tcp_ip_und_internet/ascii.htm</br>
:MichaelXXLF 15:40, 31 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: keyboard shortcuts

message: Since Umlaut is a German word, I always assumed that it specifically refers to the ä ö ü letters and sounds of German. The article presents German only as one example. What would be examples of umlauts in other languages? --AxelBoldt
Umlauts are used in many Germanic languages. E.g. fräulein in German and fröken in Swedish. As far as I know it's still called an umlaut. Also umlaut has TWO meanings: the inflected vowel and the diacritical mark itself. Both are "umlauts". I.e. ö is an "umlaut" and so are the two little dots above it. -RobertL30. Of course, whadiknow, I just took German for 6 years. We might actually need a native speaker to help clear up confusion.
That won't do, because I am a native German speaker... :-) For me, the three letters and sounds referred to above are "umlauts"; I wouldn't call the two dots by themselves an umlaut. But maybe the word "umlaut" is used differently and broader in English. --AxelBoldt
:This diacritic mark (the two dots) is actually called trema or diaeresis. As a native speaker of German, I personally would not call ä, ö, ü "Umlaut" - except in a linguistic context - their proper names are ä, ö, ü MichaelXXLF 15:27, 31 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: umlaut in other languages

message: The Turkish language has ö and ü, pronounced identically to German.  Does Turkish have a name for these characters?   -- GCarty
:I guess turkish would be similar to swedish, who uses ö and ä, but rarely with a grammatical function...
: Turkish alphabet#Names says the Turkish name is just Ö. ᛭ LokiClock (talk) 03:54, 11 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Turkish

message: While traveling in Europe a year or two ago I was investigating the terminology and found the German word "Zweipunkt" (meaning simply "two dots") used. I'd like to say that it was in the Duden Rechtschreibung book but I really can't be sure. --hippietrail
: Some slang. This says it means "on-off".. >_< --Menchi 13:20, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)
replies: text: Never heard of the word "Zweipunkt" before. I do not think there is a special name for the umlaut dots in German, since there is no need to have one. The letters ö and ü can be clearly identified by their respective sounds. Sometimes though, e.g. when spelling proper names, you have to explicitly distinguish between ä and e, since they sound similar. In this case, the letter ä (the whole letter, not just the dots on it) is called Umlaut a or Umlaut ä. --Gecek 16:45, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

text: I am a native speaker and I've never heard "Zweipunkt" so far. And I somewhat doubt that "Zweipunkt" means "on-off", we usually say "ein/aus" or "an/aus". BtW there is an article about "Zweipunkt" in the German Wikipedia, and it's referring to "Adalia bipunctata", a beatle... 80.135.66.95 15:24, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Zweipunkt is a kind of Ladybird: one with two dots, believe it or not.  --Doric Loon 18:17, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

text: "Zweipunkt" with the translation "on-off" is not a word on its own, but rather a prefix as in "on-off control system", which may be translated as "Zweipunktregelung", an engineering term for a technical system with two alternating states. Hence, "Zweipunkt" means "on-off" in a way, but definitely not in the context of umlauts. -- 134.102.204.196 11:54, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: As another native speaker, I can confirm all that. Zweipunkt was most likely meant to be a slightly funny slang term for the Umlaut. —Nightstallion (?) 13:11, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The two dots over the a/o/u are named "ä/ö/ü-Pünktchen" (ä/ö/ü-jots).. "Zweipunkt" is a kind of lady beetles (Marienkäfer) with two dots 87.182.120.247 (talk) 19:14, 21 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I've never heard either Umlaut a or Zweipunkt. In spelling, ä and e are long and therefore as distinguishable as French ê (as ai in English air) and é (which English doesn't have unmistakably, to my knowledge), to which they are equal respectively. Germans will quite often lose the distinction when it comes to words ("Bären", pronounced like "Beeren", etc.), but can distinguish them in principle and if pressed to do so. Or you use a phonetic alphabet (possibly created ad hoc), where Ä is Ärger, Ö I don't know right now (ad hoc: Österreich; why not?), Ü is "Übelkeit" to my knowledge. --93.133.217.229 (talk) 22:35, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Zweipunkt

message: I have just modified this section, and I hope it is an improvement.  The point is, the diacritic can only be called "umlaut" in German (where it indicates the umlaut phenomenon proper) or in languages which have borrowed it from German.  Someone needs to check the history of the other languages mentioned here.  I know that Turkish borrowed from German, but in some of the other cases the history may be different.  If it is, they do not belong in this article.  --Doric Loon 10:17, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Umlaut diacritic in languages other than German

message: I have added a couple of categories.  However, it seems to me that the whole category thing is very messy.  Is it helpful to have all these separate categories covering much the same ground?  As long as we have them, a key article like this must be listed in all of them, but I would be very happy if someone wanted to rationalise these in some way.  --Doric Loon 12:30, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Categories

message: A few weeks ago we debated splitting this article.  At that time I thought this was unnecessary, because the article was fairly well balanced.  However, now User Benwing has written a new article on umlaut under the title i-mutation, which broadly overlaps with the the first half of this article, though it very laudibly tries to go into more depth.  Some kind of resolution of this will be necessary, and I think it will possibly involve merging the new article into the first part of the Umlaut article.  But then the Umlaut article will be much longer and will after all need to be split.  Can I suggest those of you who have a stake in this article have a look at Talk:I-mutation and record your views there?  --Doric Loon 18:24, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Vote for splitting

message: I believe the ISBN template belongs in the article, no? But a simple Amazon search would have been easier than all of this. --SKopp 09:37, 11 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: ISBN

message: I think its the wrong plase to ask, but I don't know a better place for it: If I see a misspelled german word (no dots), should I replace it or will that cause errors when viewing it in a browser? --Blah(de) 19:10, 19 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: No, change it.  These things should be correct.  Any modern browser can read an Umlaut.  --Doric Loon 08:04, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks --Blah(de) 10:12, 25 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Umlauts in Wikipedia 

message: as the article gets longer, there is no reason to keep two separate topics bundled here. "typographical umlaut" is merely the orthographical means to express (some) umlauted vowels in German. The diacritic has other uses, and when used independently of German, it is more properly referred to as diaeresis (in English and Greek, for example; coërxion, coöperation). dab (ᛏ) 19:10, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I was bold, and I realize this is a major change and may require some cleanup, but in the long run there is really no way around this. The material was very uncleanly discributed between this article and diaeresis already. And yes, I realize the minute distinction of ¨ vs. ¨. All the more reason to discuss it in a dedicated article rather than separately: The distinction is not made by all typographic systems (certainly not by html entities), and usage overlaps. dab (ᛏ) 19:45, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Splitting, again

message: After that useful split, it is possibly time to complete the proposals I made earlier.  SO, would any of you mind if I move this article to Germanic Umlaut and create a disambiguation page at Umlaut?
--Doric Loon 10:57, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I renamed it to "Germanic umlaut", with the lowercase 'u', as "umlaut" is not a proper noun (or part of one in this context). - furrykef (Talk at me) 01:55, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

text: alright, I see that this is now treated at i-mutation, which is fair enough, (except that umlaut must not be exclusively due to /i/). dab (ᛏ) 14:57, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: move

message: :It's a bit disconcerting to see so much inaccuracy in what purports to be a standard reference work. The concepts are OK, but the examples are all over the place. The "Old English" plural (nominative) of "mouse" is mýs (that is, /mǖs/, if you can see that that's a front rounded vowel with a macron). The /mīs/ pronunciation is Middle English. The "Germanic" (taking that to mean Proto-Germanic) nominative plural was *mūsiz. This will not give Old High German muosi or German Mäuse, which point to a proto-West-Germanic form *mūsīz, with what looks like a remodeling after the i-stem plural. (Cf. Proto-West-Germanic *gastiz, *gastīz "guest" (nom. sg. and pl.) whence OHG gast, gesti, German Gast, Gäste.)  Same thing with German Füße "feet". (Incidentally, in reference to an example in the main entry, "man" was not originally one of these nouns, but an n-stem.)
:Parenthetically, in classical Germanic Philology the term umlaut, following Grimm's usage, is generally reserved for i-umlaut, the other varieties variously designated according to effect (lowering, rounding, breaking, and so on); in any case, the North Germanic languages go in for positively baroque vowel mutations compared to West Germanic. But there's no reason not to call them all "umlaut" and, for that matter, so designate any similar phenomenon in any language (and the phenomenon is abundant).  Alsihler 21:25, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Accuracy of examples

message: Dbachmann, I have just reverted a whole series of edits of yours - sorry, I hesitated to do this because you obviously spent a lot of time on it, and your edits are normally good. In this case, there are several issues. First, I think you misunderstand the term "Rückumlaut". The point is not that anyone ever thought that Umlaut took place in the past tense and then was reversed, I don't think. The "Rück" idea is not diachronic. Rather, if you take the dictionary form as the starting point, you get the illusion of it working back the way. You are right that it is a misleading term, but it is rather cute just the same, and I don't mind keeping it.  Secondly, I don't think the current opinion IS that the j disappeared before Umlaut took place. The umlaut in the present tense of "think" took place because of the j. The reason there was never Umlaut in the past tense is because the past tense never had a j. Third issue, why delete the paragraph on strong verbs? I think it is useful to show that fangen > fängt is not Ablaut. Doric Loon (talk) 05:36, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Germanic verbs 

message: In the present-day languages, and particularly German, the basic difference between umlaut and ablaut as forms of vowel mutation is that ablaut is arbitrary and umlaut predictable. It is predictable in two senses: a) you know when it will (or is likely to) happen, and you know what will happen. For example, in German a neuter noun whose plural ends in -er will always have its vowel (a/o/u) mutated, and it will always be mutated in one particular way. Thus Dorf-> Dörfer. You know the vowel will change and you know it won't be Darfer. By contrast families of words such as Mahlen/Mühle/Mehl or Licht/Leuchte or indeed the strong verbs, the vowel changes (whatever the historical reason) now have all the appearance of being totally arbitrary. This is a significant point and deserves mention. Escoville (talk) 16:24, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I would hesitate to say it is THE basic difference. It is one difference which is significant for language learners. These are two specific groups of vowel modification, which occur in different situations, have different causes, have different results, and serve different grammatical functions. I would lead with those points if I had to explain the difference. But it is true that Umlaut has a general obvious regularity in the modern language, whereas Ablaut, viewed synchronically, has the appearance of randomness. --Doric Loon (talk) 13:03, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

text: But don't forget the Umlaut (NOT Ablaut!) in geben > gibt or dachte > denken or fahren > fertig or drucken > drücken, all of which in different ways show that Umlaut is often not regular. In English, nobody thinks of foot > feet as regular. On the other hand, Ablaut can be pretty regular. If you are learning Dutch you can learn the pattern for class I verbs and apply it straight off to about thirty verbs which follow the rules of that class. In the medieval languages like Old English or Middle High German, Ablaut is regular enough that students learn the system rather than learning individual "irregular" verbs. But the thing about modern German is that the umlaut diacritc makes MOST examples of Umlaut visually regular, so it is easy to learn as a system, whereas the number of strong verbs has reduced so far that it is easier just to learn irregular verbs than to try to learn the Ablaut system. In other words, this regularity distinction is only true in some of the languages, it is not completely true even there, and it is only an issue in language pedagogics, not for any kind of systematic linguistics. --Doric Loon (talk) 10:30, 11 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Oh, not regularity in that sense. Ablaut is indeed sufficiently regular in terms of reliability. But it is irregular in terms of logic. There are some patterns that can be seen, some mirroring here and there (such as with Old Norse's 1st & 2nd conjugations), but otherwise they make little sense, phonologically, past their hypothetical original incarnation. ᛭ LokiClock (talk) 18:33, 13 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  umlaut and ablaut 

message: Umlaut is used, very popularly in at least North Germanic linguistics, to refer to other types of mutation, such as the u-mutation that created Å. This article states that umlaut is specifically a type of i-mutation. In the North Germanic case, the recognition of both u-umlaut and i-umlaut, if not also a-umlaut, is fundamental due to the entanglement of the front u-umlauts and back i-umlauts, mergers most usually considered to have taken place before umlaut became distinctive. They are truly two halves of a whole. So it is important to uphold this inclusion of other types of umlaut, and not just to reflect common practice. ᛭ LokiClock (talk) 18:50, 13 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Any opposers? ᛭ LokiClock (talk) 23:27, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

text: Perhaps we could move this article to Germanic i-mutation and create a u-mutation article. Then whoever isn't researching Old Norse won't be sidetracked by a sound change they aren't interested in. On the other hand, it would be cool to see how the two could be covered together. — Eru·tuon 02:31, 22 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: In Old Norse it's the same sound change phenomenon, just with counteracting triggers. In fact, the two umlauts can combine, such as in gø̨rvi, producing either a new phoneme or just another means of obtaining /ø/. It wouldn't kill us to refrain from explicitly excluding the other type of umlauts and to have a section on it in the larger article. I don't, however, think it could stand as an article of its own, because it's just a special case of the phenomenon. Most of the content of the article would be rehashing of the information on i-umlaut. If the section can't go here, a note should be made that umlaut goes beyond i-umlaut in Old Norse, with a link to Old Norse#Umlaut. I do think Germanic i-mutation and Germanic umlaut should be merged in any event, since they're two articles on the exact same subject. ᛭ LokiClock (talk) 04:12, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

text:  Besides, the point of an encyclopedia isn't to keep you from getting sidetracked. Rather, it should explain its subjects' function and meaning by demonstrating its range of meaning in verifiable academic usage. In academic literature on Old Norse, u-umlaut and i-umlaut are treated as types of umlaut, and their reflexes in Proto-Germanic place u-umlauts with analogous origins to i-umlauts. Compare an example of i-umlaut - fað(e)riz (PIE) > fęðr (ON); with an example of u-umlaut - faðerun (PIE) > fǫður (ON). It's not that Old Norse has a mere difference in terminology, but that there was a manifestation of the phenomenon in Old Norse that was notably different from in the others. The only reason there should be multiple articles on the same subject is when a subsection of the main article has outgrown its fishbowl. Anything else would be a WP:content fork. ᛭ LokiClock (talk) 08:10, 1 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Remove restriction to i-mutation 

message: This term is meaningless. A non-phonological sound change is an oxymoron. I'd assume phonemic is meant, but the Old Norse statement remains confusing or inaccurate. Even if it's meant that the one umlaut produces vowels purely by allophonic alternation, those vowels don't stop being phonemic. When one says that a sound change has become phonemic it means that the sounds before and after the process have become distinct, not that the sound change itself represents a system of alternation between phonemes and not between allophones. Ablaut, for example, is not a phonemic sound change because it was never an allophonic sound change.
The statement in question:
The situation in Old Norse is complicated as there are two forms of i-mutation. Of these two, only one is phonologized. ᛭ LokiClock (talk) 03:20, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Use of term "phonologized" 

message: This article begins as follows:
:: In linguistics, umlaut (from German um- "around"/"the other way" + Laut "sound") is a process whereby a vowel is pronounced more like a following vowel or semivowel.
: 
What is a "following vowel"? Michael Hardy (talk) 16:41, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Nothing technical - a vowel coming later in the word. ᛭ LokiClock (talk) 17:05, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  "following vowel" 

message: Shouldn't it be mentioned that the umlaut is two dots above the letter? Seems that there is no description in the introduction of how the umlaut is actually written.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.240.79.226 (talk) 17:36, 5 February 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: An umlaut is a sound change of the fronting of a rounded back vowel.  It is important not to confuse this with the two dots that German uses to represent these rounded front vowels.  Mochattez 05:50, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Two dots 

message: From the text it seems like "Loss of final '-z'" should result in *fōtiz -> *fōti and not *fōtiz -> *fēti.
Process         	Language      	Singular	Plural	Singular	Plural
Original form   	Proto-Germanic	*mūs    	*mūsiz	*fōts   	*fōtiz
Loss of final -z	West Germanic 	*mūs    	*mūsi 	*fōt    	*fōti
jsnx (talk) 14:29, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: In the cited source of the table (Malmkjaer et al.) I see no reference to this original Proto-Germanic /-iz/ ending. Moreover, a similar table appears in Campbell, Historical Linguistics (p. 23), without this form being mentioned (although it is mentioned in the text). So, until further clarifications on the sources, I remove this table line. בוקי סריקי (talk) 10:47, 15 March 2013 (UTC)
replies: text:  The ending was -iz < PIE -es, there are plenty of sources for that like Ringe 2006. CodeCat (talk) 14:33, 15 March 2013 (UTC)
replies: text:  Fair enough, but we still need a reference to show that the /-z/ was lost in West Germanic and not later (i.e. in Pre-Old English). Currently, the table contains data which no reference covers. בוקי סריקי (talk) 16:13, 20 March 2013 (UTC)
replies: text:  It shouldn't be too hard to find a reference for that, too, because it's pretty firmly established. All the other West Germanic languages show the same loss. It's only in the unrounding where Old English actually starts to differ from its sisters. CodeCat (talk) 17:02, 20 March 2013 (UTC)
replies: text:  It sounds you are very knowledgeable on this topic, so please go ahead and add some references. I've been trying to find references on this point, but couldn't find any clear ones. Thanks in advance! בוקי סריקי (talk) 13:38, 21 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Error in table examples? 

message: It is unfortunate, that it is not recognized in the article that Turkish and other Turkic languages have also Umlauts. In Turkish language, they use ö and ü, in Turkmen language, there is also a ü. In Hungarian they us ő for the ö --49.147.189.182 (talk) 05:00, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: This article is called Germanic umlaut. Turkish and Hungaruan are not Germanic languages. You need to distinguish the umlaut symbol ¨ from the linguistic process of umlaut. They are quite different things. CodeCat (talk) 15:14, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Umlauts in other languages 

message: Could we have a citation, please, for the claim that Umlaut in Germanic verbs is widely known as "False Ablaut", and that that is not just somebody's personal pet tag?  Otherwise I intend to remove that information. --Doric Loon (talk) 20:40, 25 May 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: I personally have never come across false ablaut, but I intend to see if I can find anything on it. In the mean time I have expanded and clarified the description of sog. Rückumlaut. (Seeaphone (talk) 02:22, 4 February 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Just came across this very old thread. As nobody has provided sources or argued in favour, I am removing this from the article.--Doric Loon (talk) 22:52, 6 November 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  False ablaut 

message: I've been a speaker of Afrikaans all my life, and am also fluent in English and German.
I have noticed that umlaut is absent in Afrikaans, after it descended from Dutch, except for maybe a few "leftovers," like "gedagte" (thought, noun). Am I correct, or does Afrikaans have it's own Umlaut of some sort? From what I've known, the answer is no. Do I stand corrected? Shalin1234 (talk) 21:26, 3 November 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Umlaut is not productive in Dutch, so it wouldn't be in Afrikaans either. However, the leftovers present in Dutch would carry over into Afrikaans, like vol vs vul. Rua (mew) 21:49, 3 November 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Umlaut in Afrikaans? 

message: I am currently trying to explain to an English speaker how he should write my last name and just wanted to send him a link with an explanation. That's how I come up with following suggestion: I would love to have a section about the alternative writing of umlauts, ie. ue instead of ü. In particular, authorities always insist to write my name with an u instead of ü and ignore my explantation. It would be awesome if there would be a clear section (without scanning the whole article) about the alternative writing so I can pinpoint everyone who insist to write my name with an u. PS. I did not want to just add a section since I know how fast a contestation on Wikipedia is started. -- Zubi 00:51, 21 April 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Alternative Writing of Umlauts 

message: The article states that "took place separately in various Germanic languages starting around 450 or 500 CE." This is almost certainly wrong, and neither of the two referenced articles for this sentence mention any dates at all. Perhaps it is a typo and BCE was meant.
I don't feel expert enough to assert a different date, but would appreciate someone with more background taking a look. Sean.pk.mcgrath (talk) 11:56, 20 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dates for i-mutation