Re: Who is zimbra?
Re: Who is zimbra?
- Subject: Re: Who is zimbra?
- From: "Mark J. Reed" <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 16:29:41 -0400
On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 9:05 PM, Philip Aker <email@hidden> wrote:
>> Although it's more correctly pronounced "byerked" ... as in the singer.
>> The dieresis flattens the vowel. BTW, are we off topic here?
>
> Not at all. Diereses are becoming increasingly common in English text due to
> the internationalism of internet and the advent of the Unicode standard.
> But I was taught that it "pinched" the vowel (not the English term for stole
> (not the noun associated with minks)).
Sort of. The diacritical mark you're thinking of is called a
"diaresis", but the function you're talking about is not diaresis.
Technically,"diaresis" in (Greek and) English indicates that a vowel
is to be pronounced separately instead of combining with the previous
one into a single sound; hence "naïve" instead of "naive" and,
historically, "coöperate" instead of "cooperate".
What you're probably thinking about is "umlaut", which involves the
modification of a vowel - though it's not consistent enough to be
characterized by some specific term like "pinching" or "flattening",
since it depends on the language and the vowel. In German, the source
of the term "umlaut", umlaut causes A to rise, O to get fronted, and U
get rounded.
Diaresis and umlaut are historically distinct functions whose
diacritical marks have both simplified to the same modern form (two
dots over the letter), which Unicode calls a "diaresis".
In Icelandic (and hence in the singer Björk's name), there is no
general umlaut; ö is actually a separate letter, and the only one
whose form appears to have such a "diacritical mark". The same letter
is written ø in Norwegian.
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