Ah nothing like Spanish pengüínos. Picky comment of the day... it's pingüino :P

"There are no lauts being ummed" - I did not know my German is an organ that can be in pain.

0:20 Native speaker of German, and I've always considered ä/ö/ü simply as separate letters. I had no idea that there is some systematic connection in the phonetics to a/o/u. Quite interesting. Also, writing umlauts like ae/oe/ue still is done in some circumstances, like in crosswords or in ASCII encoded filenames/URLs/etc, so the origin of the dots as an e still lives on in some capacity.

Did I already know all of this as a German who learned French? Yes. Did I absolutely want to watch the video anyway and found it interesting? Also yes. I just like your style of explaining things, and usually I can still learn something new - so thank you!

A few weeks ago, I explained the right way to write a Dutch word to a German colleague. He exclaimed "with an umlaut!?" and I responded with "no, that's a trema, which is a competely different thing". I didn't know just how right I was though. (To be fair, I was able to explain how the trema breaks up digraphs, and I did have a vague idea about the umlaut having been stripes rather than dots until the advent of the printing press, but I didn't really know these wildly different origins)

In Modern Greek, this diacritic ¨ isn't called diaeresis (literally: "division, separation") nor trema (literally: "opening, hole"). It's called διαλυτικά /ðialitiˈka/, which is a nominalised adjective (in the plural, since it's a pair or dots), meaning "dissolvent", and displays the same morphosemantic pattern as its English definition. Colour thinners and correction-fluid thinners are called the same.

In the spirit of pedantry: Surely the general term for these additional letter bits is "diacritic", not "accent". Accents are a type of diacritic, but not all diacritics are accents. The Umlaut dots aren't an accent because they don't indicate, you know, _accent_ (as in stress/tone) and don't derive from a symbol _typically_ used to indicate stress/tone (like ◌́, ◌̀, ◌̂ ) either.

The e above vowels didn't really _turn into_ double strokes, that's just what e looked like in certain German scripts.

I was watching an old tom scott video earlier today where he called a diaeresis an umlaut in the name Chloë and I had this exact thought. Funny timing for me, btw thanks for always making great videos

The best exemple in french of that (3:02) is the word "gageure". Most people not knowing the right pronuciation (even french speaker) says it like "gagEUre" with "eu" making /œ/ but in reality it's just "ga-ge-Ure" with the e just making the g become /ʒ/. But now thank to the reform of 1990 it can be spelled "gageüre"

The English language could really benefit from some diacritics, with the countless ways of pronouncing each letter. The verb "read" is spelled the same for both present and past tense, yet is pronounced differently, it would be nice to have a logical system where one can instantly tell how a word is pronounced just by seeing how it's spelled.

The trema is also used in Dutch words, like geëist or kopiëren, though there are loanwords like föhn and überhaupt where the two dots do act like an umlaut

In Hungarian, ö and ü have always been considered as separate letters. They actually came directly from German. More to say, they also have their long forms ő and ű which are unique Hungarian letters. Since there is a correlation of length in Hungarian the long and short vowels are considered as different letters for different sounds. ä is not present in Hungarian as a letter but as a sound in certain dialects like West Transdanubian. On some occasions, West Transdanubian Hungarians use three different sounds for e: ä, e and ë (the latter being a closed e tending towards French é but it is always short). The two-point glyph on the French ü etc. is also called a tréma. It is mostly used as ë but never as ä in French. In Finnish it's more like an umlaut but y is used instead of ü because these letters of Finnish actually came from Swedish. In Estonian, however, ü is preserved as a German heritage. Finnish-like duplication is used to write long Estonian wovels, too: aa, ää, ee, ii etc. Correlation of length in Estonian is even more complicated because according to some Estonian phoneticians, five(!) degrees of length should be distinguished. There are at least three of them for sure but in written Estonian, only two are marked: n vs. nn (for consonants too).

Fun fact: there exist completely identical (CJK) characters occupying multiple Unicode places, because apparently, before Unicode was a thing, someone in Korea decided to assign to the same character one code per pronunciation, which Unicode *kindly* adapted/had to adapt. It’s not the same as encoding Cyrillic O and Greek Omicron separately, since the characters in question are completely identical from the graphical perspective. Only to spice up the confusion, there is a Kangxi radical page in Unicode which also contain some (near) duplicates if you only consider the shape. In fact, unlimited to CJK, the presence of duplicate characters has been abused in the context of phishing, misdirecting tags on social media, etc.

Oh so that’s why Czech still got ů I’m guessing :0 Also, as a native Dutch speaker and German learner, I was aware of both uses, but I referred to both as umlaut, because that’s the only name that really stuck to me. So I’m grateful for the reminder of them having separate names! (I’ve also looked up the Dutch name and we call Diaeresis “Trema”) Another thing I’d like to share about the Dutch grammar, is that if the singular form of a word ends in a vowel (such as in "idee", "knie" and "bacterie"), it would get either -ën or -◌̈n suffixed to it in the plural form, depending on if the stress would go on the penultimate syllable (such as in "ideeën" /iˈdeɪ̆jən/ and "knieën" /ˈknijən/) or any other syllable (such as in "bacteriën" /bɑkˈteːrijən/)

Of course the German Schrift of writing the e back then just really looked like two vertical lines (which to this day are a popular way of handwriting your Umlautpunkte for them to be more visible), so it makes soo much sense that it evolved that way :o Amazing video as always man :3

I thought this would be about how apart from the ö Umlaut german also had an ő which had a slightly different origin story of how it came to be but since ö and ő looked almost the same in handwriting and were pronounced the same, the two letters were merged into one.

0:18 Correct, as a Finnish person, we don't consider Ä and Ö as A and O with something on top. They simply are their own letters. At least that's how I have always viewed them. Although I understand it is easy to view it that way especially for foreigners, beacause in many word endings you choose A or Ä depending on the word you are conjugating, and just apply it to an ending. But again, this is something native Finnish speakers don't even realize doing😂

In the brazilian portuguese (Portugal removed it in 1945) until 2015 it used to have the trema (aka=ü) in syllables like "güe", "güi", "qüe" and "qüi" to tell when we should pronunciate the "u" in some words, but after the 90s New Ortographic Agreement they just said "screw it, I'm too lazy to press shift+6 in my keyboard" and removed it, even though the sound stayed the same. Honestly, I liked the trema and I think the change is stupid, it makes no sence to remove it if the sound is still the same in the words which used it. Here are some exemples: Words like "linguiça" and "bilíngue" have a pronunciated /u/ and used to be written with an "ü". And in words like "quem" and "aquele" the syllable "que" is pronunciate as /ke/, while the letter "u" is silent.

Actually, in Unicode, you can represent ü with the single composed character with (U+00FC), or decomposed as: u (U+0075) followed by ◌̈ (U+0308)

Portuguese used to have it and tbh I wish we kept it, the writing is generally pretty phonetical in most words but that alone made a lot of pronunciations ambiguous

I knew about the umlaut, but I didn't know about its use as a "diaeresis" in French (and sometimes English)! I'm trying to learn French at the moment and some of the (absolutely insane) spelling conventions in French make a little more sense to me now. Thank you for your incidental assistance, and very cool video!

As a native German speaker and reader, I always have to actively adapt to not reading ä ö ü the way they are pronounced in German. I therefore appreciate it when French diacritics are dropped in English.

You simplified the origin of the umlaut in way that misses an interesting step. -In the fraktur script,- [correction] In the Sütterlin script, or old German cursive [/correction], the lowercase e looked kind of like we might write a cursive u, or two i's without dots, or really just two little lines. The e they wrote over the vowel was thus also two little lines, kind of like double acute accent marks. These two lines then became dots because the diäresis was a similar enough preëxisting option in type setting.

3:57 "Because who wants to write "re-enter", right?" Right! Doïng that would cause chaös.

Another comment from me, sorry: As "ü" looks like "ii" in written language this "ii" is avoided in the transcription of the German language. German distinguishes long vowels from short ones using different systems (doubling the vowel, silent "h", silent "e" or simply by not doubling following consonant). There are "aa", "ee", or "oo" to show length, but in the case of the "i" it doesn´t exist. "I" is in standard German the only vowel that can be followed by a silent "e" to indicate length (the same thing applies to the closely related language Dutch).

about "bluome" in middle high German, it was pronounced as a diphthong [uə̯] originally as it still is in most southern German dialects (alemannic, bayrish) It did became monophthongised in new high German to [uː] but this was not everywhere. I guess you were speaking about this period of time in your video.

Fun fact, the name for the actual diacritic, as opposed to the phonetic/phonological phenomena, is the trema, from the Ancient Greek word meaning “perforation” (in reference to how it looks in modern usage).

Hiii, one of the Turks out to 'come for you' here >:) And i'd just like to say... İ'd actually agree that i see the vowels "ö, ü" as their own letters, but only because we actually have a somewhat seldom used yet crucial umlaut, "Â". Take "hala" meaning 'aunt' but "hâlâ" meaning 'still; ongoing" as an example. İt actually indicates either palatalisation of the consonant before or an /aː/ for where the long vowel changes the meaning if spelt without (knowing which use is easy as it's based on the existence of a preceding consonant or not). İt actually used to be used for the 'palatalisation indication' purpose for all words with that application but has sort of just been.. phased out (unless it's like the "hala" case where there exists another word without the umlaut that has a different meaning entirely). This is why you don't really see "kâğıt, hikâyeye, mekân, rüzgâr" anymore, but rather their 'hatless' (as it's known in Turkish) spellings, for the ease of turkish typers (where the 'â' isn't usually found on the turkish keyboard) but also at the detriment of new learners, as it makes the language that much less phonetic and intuitive (and in my opinion pretty) as it otherwise was :').

2:57 English is responsible for the same sins, that's why some Nelson fanboy called her daughters Brontë instead of just Bronte, since you Britons would have spelled it _Bront_

Portuguese used to have the same use for trema, but a orthographic reform chaged that, now we don't use such diacritic anymore, so you just have to know if a vowel combination is pronounced separatly or as a diphthong.

My reaction to that information: Ö

Turkish umlaut letters have some connection with their dotless versions too. Turkish uses 2 vowel harmony systems and in one of these we seperate letters into two groups: e, i, ü, ö in one group and a, ı, u, o in the other. This actually makes me think that it would’ve been better for us to use ä instead of e since German ä has the same sound as Turkish e.

I can't explain how much I like how you end videos. It feels full of impact.

Huh, despite knowing how the Spanish diéresis works in relation to the German umlaut, it took me until you started explaining how it works in French until I understood what you meant by the two ü’s were different lol. Super cool video as always

that's so interesting, a couple weeks ago i bought some old math books from an antique store and noticed they spelled coordinate as coördinate and had no idea why. great video

Dude, I've seen every single video you've ever uploaded and I've loved them all. Keep up the good work, man!

I'd just like to say I find these videos super interesting and I have learnt a lot about the history of different languages and countries. Thank you for making these!

I actually really like the idea of using a diacritic to separate letters in English!

In Danish it's perfectly valid to replace our Æ/æ, Ø/ø and Å/å with the "old long-spellings" of respectively ae, oe, and aa. This is used primarily when e.g. typing on foreign keyboards that don't contain the Danish characters, or filling in (foreign) forms that don't accept "special characters".

Yet another video that shows me I can be interested in and care about things that I didn't before I clicked. Great video!!

Wow I didn't even realise I was watching a small youtuber. This was brilliantly put together and highly engaging. When I started watching I thought I already knew abouts umlauts and diaereses but you engaged me to the point where I continued to watch and learn despite having convinced myself I already knew what you were going to talk about. AND the bit about the greek origins of the Diaereses was something I didn't know, which I will now never forget, and as you pointed out is **excellent** pedant material. Thank you so much for making this video, I'm sure if all of your content is to this standard you will explode in popularity any time now.

What's funny is that Dutch, despite being closely related to German (and to a lesser extent to the Nordic languages) uses the trema but not the umlaut (except in one or two German loan words).

The umlaut actually also exists in other Germanic languages, even in English: man vs. men, woman vs. women, goose vs. geese, mouse vs. mice, etc, but also, for instance: to fall vs. to fell.

Dude, i love your videos. really. i'm not really into languages and their heritage. But with small little topics like that, you're totally blowing my mind with knowledge that wont ever help me in my daily life - yet, its totally fascinating. thank you :)

Man, your videos are so goddamn good. So clear and informative.

A little correction, in German ä, ö and ü are no longer considered a, o and u with accents (like é, à, ô with e, a, o in French) but they have become their own, separate letters. It doesn't really matter as we still don't mention them in the alphabet but I thought I'd clear up some confusion as you showed exactly this aspect for some other languages but German.

Sure the umlaut and the diaeresis are not the same. But I found some rare cases where the double dot doesn't function like the umlaut nor the diaeresis. For example this letter "ë" in Albanian (and a few other languages) makes the schwa sound. Another example is in the IPA, where it represents a centralised vowel like /ä/, /ɒ̈/, and even /ɪ̈/. (Yeah I searched for it in Wikipedia, but you get the point.)

properly, the terms "umlaut" and "diaeresis" refer to the specific phonological processes marked by the diacritic, which is called a trema. umlaut refers to a specific type of vowel mutation where a following vowel changes a preceding one. a classic example is mūs > mouse, mūsiz > mȳs > mice: the /i/ colored the /u/ before vanishing. norwegian and english both also underwent it, but both use entirely different letters to mark it, rather than a diacritic. this also means that calling the turkish and pinyin as umlauted vowels is wrong, since these are not known to have arisen via umlaut, though denying that they're borrowing the phonetic value of the grapheme as used in german would also be wrong. diaeresis refers to the splitting of two sounds. so for "naïve," it splits , which otherwise would create a word homophonous to "nave." and for "aigüe," it splits ; after and before , normally cancels palatalization, but in this word we want a silent after , so the trema marks diaeresis of . why can't they write it as aigu? because "aigu" is masculine and "aigüe" is feminine (it means "sharp"). why mark whether it's masculine or feminine if they're pronounced the same anyway? well, in classic poetry and singing, that is actually pronounced separately, as a schwa, and also i believe that at least one dialect of french distinguishes "aigu" /ɛgy/ from "aigüe" /ɛgyː/ in ordinary speech

welp i don't know what i was expecting when i saw this in my feed, but this turned out to be a super interesting video! i learned french in high school, and am a german learner now, and i was actually very surprised that in german ä ö ü are distinct letters from a o u and not just special accent markings. And then came trying to learn their pronunciation! this video ended up being a nice little origin story for the distinction between those languages.

I'm so glad someone finally made this video. Thank you

Lauts being ummed is my new favorite sentence

Before the correction of French orthography in 1990 the tréma was sometimes placed next to the vowel we were supposed to pronounce, hence the word « aigüe » was spelled « aiguë ». That was non-sense, so the reform was good. However was incomplete because the tréma is still missing on many words like « aiguille » and « linguiste » were the u must be pronounced but you can’t guess it!

this sounds like another good idea to include in the diacretic study reform you made a while ago

Love this kind of videos, good job

Brazilian portuguese used to have the diaeresis (called "trema") in many words. It was used over the u as ü to indicate a change of sound while using the letters g and q. For example, in the word "guisado" (stew) the "gui" is pronounced as in "given". But in the word "lingüiça" (sausage), the "güi" should be pronounced as in "penguin". An orthographic agreement from 1990 intended to standardize and simplify the Portuguese orthography. As a result of this, the "trema" was abolished entirely and it is not used anymore to indicate those differences in pronunciation. It means that even if you write "linguiça", you still pronounce it as in "penguin". To know when to pronounce the inexistent trema is a matter of practice now. Also, there are some word that allows both pronunciations, such as "liquido" (liquid) where you can pronounce either as in "liquid" or in "kit". The only exception for this rule is when it is used as the umlaut in foreign words like Müller.

Many would say you miswrote “aiguë” in the examples, for the rule in French is that the “tréma” is always placed on the _second_ letter of a pair whose sounds we wish to separate. This is why you have “Noël,” “exiguë,” “ambiguïté,” etc. Alternate spellings have been introduced in 1990, but in this case I believe they just made French even more inconsistent because they destroyed an easy to understand and consistent rule, and generally made everything needlessly confusing. After all, you can now write “exigüe,” with the accent on the first letter, but good luck trying to pass of “näif,” or “äieux” as valid words. For once, I think it’s objectively better and more consistent to stick to the traditional spellings.

the music is very pleasant! well done all around.

Marvelous. Very well done.

In Turkish, we also have "ı" and "i".

In the German story, it’s crucial to realize that “e” in German handwriting looked much like “n”. The two dots derive from two downstrokes.

Simply wonderful, thank you so much for the explanation!

"there are no lauts to be um''ed." Honestly, that was one of the best remarks in KZfaq history

Just to note and sort of add to the point of the video, the ukranian/rusyn Ï ï is not an I i with an umlaut or daeresis, instead its a iotated /i/ sound, therefore /ji/ (yee would be an english approximation). Fun fact: The Ï ï was in ukranian before I i, but the I i was later added and the two diverged into different sounds.

Now I'm wondering about Portuguese because we had "ü" but then a spelling reform decided that even though no one was complaining about it and it made spelling easier we should remove it.

That was good. You covered a couple of things I was always curious about: the origins of the umlaut, and why naive sometimes has those marks.

As a Flemish Belgian I've had trouble explaining to my German and Finnish friends how the trema we use in Dutch is different from their umlaut, and why I consider it an accent mark rather than their interpretation of it being a wholly separate letter. (which makes no sense, the alphabet has 26 letters, fight me) I'm definitely sending them this video. :D

I really found this particular video very insightful! History can teach anything and everything that can be taught. History teaches not only the what and how but very often the why things are the way they are!

Thanks for that video! Thats all good to know! And I loved the music in the end! Can you make a longer video with simple music like this, it's quite relaxing and inspiring :)

The New Yorker magazine famously continues to use the diaeresis in print to indicate a forced pronunciation of a vowel. E.g. coöperate - it’s not “koo-per-ate” as the “oo” would normally indicate but “ko-op-er-ate” It’s a bit pretentious but that’s their shtick anyway. Edit: Ha! I wrote the comment before they were mentioned at the end of the video.

Cooperate used to be spelt "co-operate" -- and still is by those who know how to spell! Resist the Americanisation of British English! 💪

thank you for teaching me something I actually didn't know :D I have a goal to learn at least one new thing a day!

Very interesting! Thanks for this video, Me!

"They are written identically in all writing styles" well... Speaking for German and French, they are sometimes written quite differently, in German it is often made with two vertical lines, and I know people who combine the two lines in a sort of tilde, while in French it is generally made with two dots. Maybe these are just different handwriting styles? Sure, but in my very small sample size of personal writing styles in German and French there is quite a difference. Maybe it is because lines are easier to write than dots and the umlaut is much more common on German than the diaeresis in French? Maybe it is a remnant of the old gothic (Fraktur, Sütterlin) scripts with lines, not dots?

Angry german noises: äöü are seperate letters in german as well >:(

thank you for the tidbit of the week

rly interesting and well explained!

Damn, I learn something new every day. That was really interesting.

Very nice video! Diaeresis from dia (shows division) and haeresis (meaning "choice/destruction") it can either be inferred to "break down" a digraph or to "pick apart" the one letter they're put on to pronounce separately. The diaeresis/dialytika goes back to Ancient Greece (and indeed they're still used in Modern Greek in the same way) where there were many vowel digraphs that made separate sounds from the individual standalone letters they were made up from. The marking is one of the many in traditional Greek Polytonic script, but one of the only two that are still used in official Modern Greek (the other being the τόνος/tonos, a stress accent). PS, the modern Greek name, dialytika, means "those that destroy/break apart"

Fascinating. More, please. Subscribed. ;-)

This video made me so happy.

Très bien expliqué! Merci!

Fascinating - thank you 😉

Thank you. I learned something new!

I've just discovered you! Very nice video. You have a new subscriber :)

I find it interesting that Sweidsh has both the standard ö and ä umlauts, but also has the superscript for å. It's cool.

Very informative video

Thanks for explaining my language to me. I actually learned some new things

4:08 Also in names like Chloe, Zoe, the word zoological (yes, the two "o"s have slightly different pronounciations), Bootes (pronounced "boo-au-teez"), etc.

Small sidenote: The "Um" in "Umlaut" can mean "around", too, which i find more logical than "in another way" (which i havn't heard before). E.g. "schauen" = looking, "umschauen" = "looking around" "fahren" = "driving", "umfahren" = "driving around [an obstacle]", or "driving over [something, e.g. a child]"

The case of French "aigue" is interesting as it shows a shift in spelling: when I was young, and even not so long ago still, the trema would be placed on the 2nd vowel to show it should be pronounced distinctly: aiguë - I think it's still the recommended spelling, but because a lot of people got confused, now the spelling aigüe is also accepted.

In Swedish we have the letter Å. It's an ablaut of an Old Norse or Proto-Norse A. There is also a region in Italy where they have it, but it's of course not the same diacritic either.

Um this is really good gear. Channel growth imminent.

0:15 'though its usually kind of optional' As someone who's last name is Noël, typing and 'simplicity' has basically forced it to be optional, but if I'm writing it out, I always add the accents.

Cool vid+ informative

1:55 from what I know these digraphs where one letter is above the other where done to reduce the amount of space needed for writing, effectively reducing the numbers of pages needed for a book to make it cheaper, especially after the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg in 1440, because unlike in handwritten books where labour was the main cost factor, for printed books it was the number of pages.

Can we just take a moment to appreciate how masterfully Also Me edited this video.

It's worth it to take a look at the examples at 2:26 again: two lines/dots aren't just the most convenient symbol people could come up with. In old German cursive, the e is basically two such lines, but connected in a cursive way. Quite similar to an angular n. The example word given is "schön", with the letter looking like v being the o.

excellent!

I worked in an archive (in Austria) last year and interestingly, I have seen the letters ä, ö and ü writte with an e above a, o or u respectively quite often. Keep in mind that these documents were not very old (the oldest document I worked with was written around 1840). Actually, I had seen it most often in documents from the first half of the 20th century (alongside the nowadays common variants), but in documents written after the 50s I never saw it written like that.