Umlaut

In German

Operation of the metaphony

The case is especially known for the German . In this language, the vowels /a/, /i/, /o/ and /u/ inflected by the metaphony undergo a Palatalisation or a change of their Aperture. The conditioning environment of origin was the presence of a /i/ or a /j/, palatal phonemes, in the following syllable, phoneme which is amuï by leaving its palatal character to the preceding vowel, or of a /a/, open vowel which, while disappearing, opens in its turn the preceding vowel. After the umlaut acquired a grammatical role, its use extended by Analogie. The historical metaphonies proceeded in three phases, during the period of the Vieux high German with the Moyen high German included (of the end of).

Here some examples of metaphonies:

in Old high German, gast , “host”, made his plural in gesti . The change of stamp of the radical vowel indicates that there was metaphony well and that the final vowel was amuïe or was on the way to do it. It is a metaphony by /i/. Currently, one writes Gast / Gäste ;
conversely, one finds helphan , “to help”, as old man high German, resulting from a radical *hilp- (present in Gotique) whose vowel underwent the inflection by /a/ and opened. Currently, the verb became helfen , that one can compare with Hilfe , “assistance”. The metaphony is not, in the case of /i/ become /e/, not noted by diacritic.

To note that the E of gesti and that of helphan were not identical: the first was closed and the open second. This difference remains into Germanic, where hälfe has a vowel more opened than gescht . (Source: grammars of old German, e.g. Wilhelm Braune, Althochdeutsche Grammatik; many editions, to see their chapter on the vowels.) This difference in pronunciation does not have on the other hand anything to see with the difference in orthography current literary German between Gäste and helfen (one writes Gäste to mark the bond with the Gast singular).

With final, the metaphonies are the following ones (the notation follows the API):

/a.. I → /e.. I;
/i.. →/ε has… has;
/u.. I → /y.. I;
/u.. → // has;
// →/œ… I.

Notation of the inflected vowels

The word umlaut is also used, wrongly for some, to indicate the mark Diacritique made up of two small points placed above a vowel to indicate the metaphony. The same mark is used for to note the Tréma in other languages, as in French or Catalan. In the German Typographie, however, it is not rare that the inflected vowels do not carry a sign comparable with the dieresis but rather with the Double acute accent. For example, in the German Grammar of Maurice Bouchez (Belin editions) the inflected vowels are written a̋ , ő and ű .

The origin of this graphic symbol is a '' E '' diacritic writes behind the vowel concerned which then was superscribed (traced above the vowel) then simplified in two points. The old C-Ws communication in Gothic script then Fraktur and Sütterlin schrift make it possible to better include/understand such a process of simplification: the letters are indeed stiffer and angular and the E can be reduced to two vertical features more or less connected by the top, which it became in the Sütterlinschrift . Remainder, the mark of umlaut in Sütterlinschrift is clearly small a E superscribed, which shows how much the origin diacritic remained a long time obvious with the Germans and explains why confusion with a dieresis was still impossible. The following table shows the characters in Sütterlinschrift and Antiqua (“normal” alternative of the Latin alphabet):

This E was not written that after the vowels has , O and U . The metaphony of /i/ in /e/ does not need to be noted by this artifice: the letter E is enough. For example, the name Mann /man/, “man”, become in the plural Männer /'mεnər/. The vowels which can, in German, to undergo the metaphony are the following ones:

has /a/ → ä /ε/( E of father );
O /o/ → ö /œ/( have of fear or have of little );
U /u/ ( or of neck ) → U /y/ ( U of known ).

In German-speaking Switzerland, the umlauts are often printed in the form of Digramme S, that is to say ae , oe , ue . It is an orthography archaïsante. However, one also often finds it on Internet, when the characters with diacritic are inalienable.

In other languages

The German orthography inspired by other languages which always do not have a genetic report/ratio.

The letters with umlaut of the Hungarian, the Turkish , the Azeri and others are ö and U , whose pronunciation is similar to those of German (also, in Hungarian, there exists a “long umlaut”, i.e. a Double acute accent making it possible to obtain ő and ű compared to ö and U ). One notes the absence of ä .

In Finnish, in Estonian, in the Languages SAMES, some Scandinavian Languages (Icelandic and Swedish), of the characters of aspect and pronunciation similar to the German letters with umlaut ( ä , ö , U ) is used but regarded as independent letters which are treated with share in the alphabetical order, where they appear at the end of the list.

Apart from the Germanic languages (German and Scandinavian languages), the vowels with dieresis are not used to mark grammatical variations nor lexical and to use the term of umlaut to indicate them is unsuitable. It is better, in this case, speech of a Tréma.

However that the function of the umlaut was taken again for certain transcriptions of Chinese languages the such hanyu pinyin for the letter “u/U” (with the same nuance of pronunciation as for German), which gives the astonishing diacritics ǖ/Ǖ, ǘ/Ǘ, ǚ/Ǚ and ǜ/Ǜ, the higher sign giving the your.

Coding of the vowels with umlaut

With the edition, when the umlauts are not available, they are replaced by the subjacent vowel followed by a E . This modification is appropriate perfectly to German, because there is no other case where one will use a vowel followed by a E , except some imported words of other languages, like Citroen .

In HTML, the named entity the representative will be noted &? uml; (the basic letter followed by uml). All the vowels with umlaut, as well as the ß ( eszett , another typical character of German, included here for reference), belong to the character set ISO 8859-1 and have the same point of code in this play and in Unicode. In Latex, the diacritic ones are added by \ "? (two points) and \ H? (two acute accents).

English metaphony

The English, Germanic Language, preserved some of these modifications through irregular plurals like man / men , tooth / teeth , goose / geese , etc, although it lost the suffixes which caused them in the beginning. The orthography and the pronunciation still carry the mark from there. One names this metaphony I-change or first vowel shift (“first rocker of the vowels”). It was held in Vieil English, at the 7th century.

For example, for the couple foot / feet , one makes go up these forms with étymons following *fōt in the singular, *fōt-iz in the plural, are foot / feet currently. The orthography shows that this word passed by the following achievements:

singular: *fōt → /f ūt/(closing of the vowel) → currently /f ŭt/(shortening of the vowel);
plural: *fōt-iz → /f ētiz/(metaphony of /o/ by /i/) → /f ēt/(Disappearance of the Ending) → currently /f īt/(closing of the vowel).

This metaphony also meets in the lexical Dérivation and makes it possible to include/understand why a word as blood (“blood”) is related to the same radical as bleed (“to bleed”).

Umlaut heavy metal;
Eszett .

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