Re: CHAT: F.L.O.E.S.

On Mon, Feb 23, 2004 at 02:23:54PM -0800, Aquamarine Demon wrote:
>    I don't know what an umlaut does, but I'm guessing
>    it's something to do with pronunciation, obviously
Umlaut is used to refer to both a phonological phenomenon and the
orthographic representation of that phenomenon in certain languages,
especially German.

The phenomenon is the formation of certain forms of words (e.g. plurals
of nouns, certain verb tenses) by a systematic alteration of the vowel
in the stem of the base form.   There are different kinds of umlaut
depending on how it developed.  German has i-umlaut, which means that
the words in question were originally formed by adding -i to the stem.
As speakers spoke the language, they would automatically adjust their
mouth in anticipation of the [i] vowel, as a result of which the earlier
vowel became more "i-like" (pronounced higher and further toward the
front of the mouth).   Later, the -i disappeared, leaving only the
altered stem vowel as the way the word was formed.

Using CXS, plus an attempt at French phonetic versions from what little I
recall of French phonetics, the shifts are as follows:

[a] becomes [e]         (a becomes é)
[O] becomes [9]         (o becomes eu)
[o] becomes [2]         (eau becomes eux)
[u] becomes [y]         (ou becomes u)
[U] becomes [Y]         (??? sorry, at a loss for French here)

Orthographically, the umlaut is represented in German by putting two
dots over the vowel.  So <a> represents [a], but <ä> represents [e],
etc.  As a result, the diacritical mark which consists of two dots over
a letter is sometimes itself called an "umlaut".  At other times, it is
called a "diaresis" - which is just another functional name, describing
what it does in English instead of German: indicate that a vowel is to
be pronounced separately instead of forming a diphthong.  Thus "naïve"
is something more like /naj'iv/ than /nejv/, modulo 'lectical variation.

-Mark

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