Кое-что про умляуты и вообще о немецком

[iti]

timwi пишет:

"It is a common belief among both German and English speakers that the term "umlaut" refers to a letter with two dots on top. I would like to clear up this misunderstanding and explain the difference between umlauts and diaereses.

A diaeresis - plural diaereses - refers to the two dots on a letter. For example, ä is a Latin small letter a with a diaeresis. This does not say anything about what the diaeresis actually does in the word or language it appears in.

An umlaut is a linguistic concept and describes the way a vowel in a word stem gets changed due to a declination, conjugation, or other change of form. The term came about when Old German started developing the notion of such a vowel change. Writers first began indicating this change in pronunciation by adding an extra e to the vowel (there were no official spelling rules at that time, and writers chose their own way of writing); later, people started reducing that e in size and placing it on top of the vowel; and even later, that small e slowly developed into a little scribble and finally the two dots that we see today. Then, over the centuries, the newly created letters with diaereses became representatives of certain sounds in the German language and came into use in places where they were not used as umlauts - yet they continued to be referred to as umlauts."

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