As an undergrad, thanks to the fact that I could easily do diacritics with TeX, I was overfond of using the diaeresis (I had gleaned from observation, not just in the New Yorker but also the writings of Donald Knuth, that a diaeresis served to distinguish two vowels that were pronounced separately which might otherwise form a diphthong).
The thing that helped me limit this practice more than anything else was a comment from Nelson Beebe that whenever he saw coördinate in something I had written, he mentally pronounced it as if he were channeling¹ Peter Sellars’s Inspector Clouseau.
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1. The New Yorker style guide would call for this to be spelled “channelling.” The diaeresis is not the only idiosyncrasy of that publication’s style.
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.
'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.
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
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).
Comments
As an undergrad, thanks to the fact that I could easily do diacritics with TeX, I was overfond of using the diaeresis (I had gleaned from observation, not just in the New Yorker but also the writings of Donald Knuth, that a diaeresis served to distinguish two vowels that were pronounced separately which might otherwise form a diphthong).
The thing that helped me limit this practice more than anything else was a comment from Nelson Beebe that whenever he saw coördinate in something I had written, he mentally pronounced it as if he were channeling¹ Peter Sellars’s Inspector Clouseau.
⸻
1. The New Yorker style guide would call for this to be spelled “channelling.” The diaeresis is not the only idiosyncrasy of that publication’s style.
But how do I tell you to get eggs from the coöp without confusion?
Wait, really? I thought that was a British versus American English thing.
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.
'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.
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
In Dutch I appreciate the diaresis in zeeën and the like. Can’t think of an English example though.
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).
Naïf... if you can call that English.
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