Re: French spelling scheme

Christophe wrote:
>
>En réponse à Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>:
>
> >
> > What's the origin of the diaerisis? And the trema for that matter? The
> > origin of the umlaut is a small superscript "e". In Swedish, the word
> > "trema" us used for the diacritic[1], so it's only another name for
> > umlaut,
> > or?
> >
>
>Well, in French, "umlaut" and "diérèse" (diaeresis) are names for
>linguistic
>phenomena (umlaut is the diachronic phenomenon that produced fronting of
>stem-vowels in Germanic when there was an ending in -i, as well as the
>synchronic grammatical phenomenon occuring because of it, while diérèse is
>the
>phenomenon of putting a hiatus between two vowels and not pronouncing them
>as a
>diphtongue) while the name for the diacritic is "tréma". As for its origin,
>for
>what I've gathered it has different origins in Romance and Germanic
>languages.
>In Germanic languages it would be the simplification of a superscript "i",
>in
>Romance languages it would be the simplification of a superscript "e". It's
>only
>one of the stories I've heard though...
You have got those two the wrong way around, or? At any rate, I'm positive
that the "umlaut" diacritic in German and Swedish descend from earlier
superscripte "e"s. This is what all books I've read that deals with the
subject says, it's supported by the alternative spellings {ae}, {oe} and
{ue} for the sounds usually indicated wiht {ä}, {ö} and {ü}, and lastly it's
strongly suggested by some fraktur fonts I've seen (in actual old books)
that use a small superscript "e" to indicate the umlaut.

                                                       Andreas
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