Re: French spelling scheme

Actually, just last week I saw a Hannoverian legal text published in the 1820's, printed
in Fraktur with tiny superscript e's over umlauted vowels. I wish I could send
a picture. One of the cool, if obscure, things you can find at the New York
Public Library. In case you didn't know, ae, ue, oe are still used as
altertnate spellings for the corresponding umlaut vowels. You sometimes see
them in e-mails or on the web, where it's can be hard to type umlauts (for
those of us with non-German keyboards at least ;).

-WW

On Mon, 07 May 2001, Christophe Grandsire wrote:

>
> En réponse à Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>:
>
> >
> > 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.
>
> Well, in fact I think I've talked nonsense :) . Indeed, the German "umlaut"
> diacritic descends from a superscript "e", while Romance "diaeresis" diacritic
> probably comes from imitation of Ancient Greek. I really shouldn't do three
> things at the same time...
>
> Christophe.
>
> http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr