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X-G
Member #856
December 2000
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Quote: if he turns out anything like your "picture" in your avatar, I'm going to cry. I think it's the mother that's going to cry the day she has to give birth to that spiky thing. o_O 23: Whoa. Talk about repressed... -- |
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Mars
Member #971
February 2001
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Congrats, Harbinger! And that news story just smells faked. Lots of edits: Well, I've found two German stories confirming that one. The Ananova article appears to be a direct translation of the first one. However, one would assume there to be more news about it here in Germany. The second one adds some information: The husband apparently didn't want to give any reasons for their abstinence, while his wife talks about erection problems. So I guess they knew what sex is, but still prefered to hope for immaculate conception... Scary stuff. I wonder why the town is called "Lubek" in that article. There is no town with that name -- it's "Lübeck". Note the diaresis and the c. There is an article by The Mirror about it. The author Allan Hall from Berlin previously wrote about someone eaten by his pet spiders which he based of some completely faked (German) articles in the Sun and its German counterpart Bild. The original source seems to be this article in the German Medical Tribune. Maybe there is some truth behind this all. -- |
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X-G
Member #856
December 2000
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Quote: Note the diaresis and the c.
That's not a diaeresis, it's an umlaut. Diaereses are used to mark that a vowel should be pronounced distinctly, which is not always the case. Examples include words like naïve in English or the name Zoë. The umlaut is used to mark a change in pronunciation of a vowel, as in ö or ü. These days both are written the same way — two diacritical dots — but they are not the same. (Note that while in languages like German and Swedish, letters like Ö are letters of their own right, but the ¨ is still considered a diacritical mark.) -- |
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Mars
Member #971
February 2001
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I would say that an umlaut in the German language is one of the letters (ä,ö,ü) and not the dots on top of them. So the umlaut is not really the mark to denote a change in pronunciation but really the whole thing. I don't know how to refer to the dots themselves if "dieresis" isn't correct. -- |
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X-G
Member #856
December 2000
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Uhm, you can't just "say" that it is something. The concepts of the umlaut, diaeresis, and diacritical mark is well-defined within the field of linguistics. Either you can describe umlaut as the process of a vowel changing pronunciation, as in Mann -> Männer, or, more commonly, as the name of the diacritical dots used in such a formation. (There is a similar but different process called ablaut in some languages — as in sing/sang/sung) Quote: I don't know how to refer to the dots themselves if "dieresis" isn't correct.
Quote: These days both are written the same way — two diacritical dots — but they are not the same. ... or you can just call them an umlaut. I urge you to read my post again carefully. The umlaut is the mark used to change the pronunciation, and a diaeresis is a different thing from an umlaut, even though they are written the same way. Historically umlauts looked like a tiny e written above the letter (Ä <=> Ae, Ö <=> Oe, etc) - however, in Sütterlin script, the e looked like two small dashes. Confusion arose and the umlaut gradually slipped into being drawn as two dots, just like the diaeresis. -- |
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Mars
Member #971
February 2001
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I understood all that, but I guess that's a case where common usage of the word is not the same as its technical usage. I wouldn't personally say umlaut to the dots, only to the letter as a whole. -- |
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gnolam
Member #2,030
March 2002
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Quote: (Note that while in languages like German and Swedish, letters like Ö are letters of their own right, but the ¨ is still considered a diacritical mark.) That's not really true for German, is it? In German, o == ö as far as sorting order etc. goes... it's other Germanic languages (particularly Nordic ones) that make the distinction. -- |
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nicholle
Member #1,024
February 2001
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Congrats nicholle |
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Oscar Giner
Member #2,207
April 2002
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Quote: Diaereses are used to mark that a vowel should be pronounced distinctly, which is not always the case Diaereses can also be used to break a diphthong. Like in Catalan països, that should be pronounced as pa-í-sos instead of pái-sos; also in traïdor, that should be pronounced as tra-i-dór, not trai-dór. This is different as in Spanish, where an accent is always used for this. Here we use the word diaeresis to name the two points above the vowel. -- |
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Bruce Perry
Member #270
April 2000
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What did you think "pronounced distinctly" meant? -- |
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23yrold3yrold
Member #1,134
March 2001
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Quote: i have only met one girl my entire life that had it spelt that way I'm pretty sure I went to school with a Nicholle that spelt her name in a variation that ended with the 'l' and might have had an 'a' in it, but I can't recall it exactly ... 'Nichoal'? Hmmm .... -- |
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Trumgottist
Member #95
April 2000
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Congratulations! (I might be late, but I'm also early, since he/she/it isn't yet born.) -- Play my game: Frasse and the Peas of Kejick |
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Derezo
Member #1,666
April 2001
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Nachol? Anyway "He who controls the stuffing controls the Universe" |
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