I was on board with the fanciness of this editorial stance for a while. But after I recently learned what diaereses are for I think, what’s the point? You know how cooperate is pronounced. You know that being naive is not being a knave.
English spelling is bad enough overall but words like that don’t even come up on my radar in that context.
You know what a really good editorial stance would be? Simplify the dang French words. How am I supposed to spell beurocracy? Why can’t it just be “byurocracy”? Please lead the charge on this one NY.
I think, what’s the point? You know how cooperate is pronounced. You know that being naive is not being a knave.
Not everybody does know that, especially not non-native speakers, which English obviously has in abundance.
Dieresis is not really the best symbol for this given that it's much more commonly used for completely different things in other languages, but at the very least it makes you stop and consider why it's there in an unfamiliar word, and perhaps check its pronunciation in a dictionary.
(The more sensible thing would be to use the apostrophe as syllable separator where necessary, as in na'ive, co'operation etc - it is already frequently used this way in English in foreign names anyway, and is much more intuitive for non-native speakers.)
I'm not a fan of dieresis for this specifically because it's too confusing due to its frequent use for other things in other languages. But there are other ways to indicate it.
The problem is that even when you do know the words, there can still be ambiguities. Especially given how frequent outright typos are these days (being exposed to typos significantly lowers your reading comprehension for well-written text).
If you see "reemerge", a fraction of your brain is wasted trying to think whether it should really be "remerge", but "reëmerge" clarifies itself immediately. And "coop" vs "coöp" is outright ambiguous however you try it.
The acute accent is probably more important - it forces a pronunciation change of the vowels, disambiguating "to resume" from "a résumé". Unfortunately there remain many heterophones without a standard accent placement ("minute" is horrible).
The grave accent is rarely needed outside of poetry; the only word I'm aware of that requires it is "learnèd" (adjective meaning "knowledgeable").
The accent isn't actually critical there, since it means the same either way. It's just that it's so common in poetry that even in prose for any particular word it sounds funny to swap the pronunciation out.
Since the usual rule for poetry is to forbid long syllables next to each other and the stress is always on the "bles", we normally pronounce it "blest" before syllables that start with stress and "blessèd" before unstressed syllables. But "blessèd" can occur before unstressed syllables in tunes that include LSSL (the only examples I can find off the top of my head are "blessèd redeemer" and "blessèd are those/they/we" (huh, that's a really weird meter: LXSLSSLSXS/LSXSLSL times 4, except that the last is /LSLSXSLSL), and in both cases there are probably more hymns with "blest" before the words).
LSSL is often because of trochaic substitution (usually at the start of a line) or anapestic substitution (common anywhere, but the leading L means it can't be the start of the line here). Pure anapests (easy, but iambs are just so easy to reach for) or some kind of use of dactyl (not too hard, but even trochee is uncommon in the first place) are also viable. Other theoretical ways to construct LSSL are very rare in English (amphibrach sequences are common in some analyses, but I prefer to treat them as iamb + anapests + lone short, or even lone short + dactyles + trochee, because when speaking we strongly prefer to keep short syllables together).
Comments
I was on board with the fanciness of this editorial stance for a while. But after I recently learned what diaereses are for I think, what’s the point? You know how cooperate is pronounced. You know that being naive is not being a knave.
English spelling is bad enough overall but words like that don’t even come up on my radar in that context.
You know what a really good editorial stance would be? Simplify the dang French words. How am I supposed to spell beurocracy? Why can’t it just be “byurocracy”? Please lead the charge on this one NY.
Not everybody does know that, especially not non-native speakers, which English obviously has in abundance.
Dieresis is not really the best symbol for this given that it's much more commonly used for completely different things in other languages, but at the very least it makes you stop and consider why it's there in an unfamiliar word, and perhaps check its pronunciation in a dictionary.
(The more sensible thing would be to use the apostrophe as syllable separator where necessary, as in na'ive, co'operation etc - it is already frequently used this way in English in foreign names anyway, and is much more intuitive for non-native speakers.)
As a non-native speaker, coöperate does NOT help, it makes it harder to recognizes otherwise familiar words.
Especially when one comes from a language where ö is a completely different letter than o.
I'm not a fan of dieresis for this specifically because it's too confusing due to its frequent use for other things in other languages. But there are other ways to indicate it.
The problem is that even when you do know the words, there can still be ambiguities. Especially given how frequent outright typos are these days (being exposed to typos significantly lowers your reading comprehension for well-written text).
If you see "reemerge", a fraction of your brain is wasted trying to think whether it should really be "remerge", but "reëmerge" clarifies itself immediately. And "coop" vs "coöp" is outright ambiguous however you try it.
The acute accent is probably more important - it forces a pronunciation change of the vowels, disambiguating "to resume" from "a résumé". Unfortunately there remain many heterophones without a standard accent placement ("minute" is horrible).
The grave accent is rarely needed outside of poetry; the only word I'm aware of that requires it is "learnèd" (adjective meaning "knowledgeable").
and blessèd
The accent isn't actually critical there, since it means the same either way. It's just that it's so common in poetry that even in prose for any particular word it sounds funny to swap the pronunciation out.
Since the usual rule for poetry is to forbid long syllables next to each other and the stress is always on the "bles", we normally pronounce it "blest" before syllables that start with stress and "blessèd" before unstressed syllables. But "blessèd" can occur before unstressed syllables in tunes that include LSSL (the only examples I can find off the top of my head are "blessèd redeemer" and "blessèd are those/they/we" (huh, that's a really weird meter: LXSLSSLSXS/LSXSLSL times 4, except that the last is /LSLSXSLSL), and in both cases there are probably more hymns with "blest" before the words).
LSSL is often because of trochaic substitution (usually at the start of a line) or anapestic substitution (common anywhere, but the leading L means it can't be the start of the line here). Pure anapests (easy, but iambs are just so easy to reach for) or some kind of use of dactyl (not too hard, but even trochee is uncommon in the first place) are also viable. Other theoretical ways to construct LSSL are very rare in English (amphibrach sequences are common in some analyses, but I prefer to treat them as iamb + anapests + lone short, or even lone short + dactyles + trochee, because when speaking we strongly prefer to keep short syllables together).
Whoops I wrote that backwards but whatever.