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Re:Umlauts, Diaereses, and the New Yorker (2020) by wongarsu on Thursday January 30, 2025 @04:19PM (#42882289)
On a, u and o diaresis just replace one ambiguity (is it coord-inate or co-or-di-nate) with another (is coördinate supposed to be co-ordinate or co-ördinate with ö pronounced as ö instead of o). On e and i that ambiguity doesn't exist. So I find myself sometimes writing naïve or noël, but never coördinate.
Re:Umlauts, Diaereses, and the New Yorker (2020) by Freak_NL on Thursday January 30, 2025 @05:07PM (#42882642)
'Coördinate' and the likes make perfect sense to anyone who started out with a language such as Dutch or French where this is common. It's rather refreshing to see it used in English, where usually even the humble 'resumé' must beg for its accent aigu.

It never confuses me though, despite being able to read German as well. The mind just shifts to whichever language you're reading and interprets any diacritics accordingly. English just doesn't seem to fall under the 'those are umlauts' category of languages for me.

Re:Umlauts, Diaereses, and the New Yorker (2020) by wongarsu on Thursday January 30, 2025 @07:44PM (#42883721)
It certainly helps that there are very few words in English that use umlauts, and even fewer where an umlaut following a vowel could happen. I guess theoretically you could form the word Astroübermensch (who knows, maybe that's what Musk will call it when he selects the best people to send to Mars). Then it would be ambiguous whether you mean the übermensch spelling and pronunciation or the more common ubermensch. But that's a stretch
Re:Umlauts, Diaereses, and the New Yorker (2020) by CalRobert on Thursday January 30, 2025 @05:10PM (#42882678)
In Dutch I appreciate the diaresis in zeeën and the like. Can’t think of an English example though.
Re:Umlauts, Diaereses, and the New Yorker (2020) by seszett on Thursday January 30, 2025 @05:23PM (#42882774)
Naïf... if you can call that English.
Re:Umlauts, Diaereses, and the New Yorker (2020) by Symbiote on Thursday January 30, 2025 @05:49PM (#42882984)
It's English. Naïve is more commonly known.

Very few people would write the dots, but I wonder if that's more because they don't know how to type it than anything else.

Here's a list: https://github.com/RichardLitt/diaeresis-word-list

Re:Umlauts, Diaereses, and the New Yorker (2020) by maxdamantus on Thursday January 30, 2025 @09:24PM (#42884198)
Maybe "cooëeïng", though I don't think I've seen that written with diaereses (probably not a very common word, but it's a nice example of a long vowel letter sequence, and one that people from NZ/Australia should understand).