Re: French spelling scheme
| From: | Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, May 3, 2001, 9:55 |
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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...
Christophe.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
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