Re: French spelling scheme

Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
> > Date:         Mon, 30 Apr 2001 21:00:31 -0400
> > From: Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
> >
> > Robert Hailman wrote:
> > > [Someone else]:
> > > > Yet Spanish has ü, and no other umlauted characters.
> > >
> > > Really? What does it represent? I can't recall ever seeing that,
> > > although I'll admit to knowing very little Spanish.
> >
> > It's not used very often.  It's used only in güe and güi to indicate
> > that the u is pronounced (i.e., güe = /gwe/, gue = /ge/).  For instance,
> > _lingüística_ "linguistics".
>
>Well, then, strictly speaking, it isn't an umlaut, but a sort of trema
>or diaeresis. Like in French maïs = maize.
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?

                                                    Andreas

[1] In Swedish, {ä} and {ö} not treated as "a" and "o" with a diacritic but
as independent graphemes for the purpose of alphabetizing things etc, but in
pretty much all other respects they're used as in German. {ü} doesn't
occcur.
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