Re: Real language questions
| From: | Roger Mills <romilly@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, October 9, 2001, 4:03 |
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Tom Wier wrote:
>
>> Another one for the team: dieresis is also spelled diaeresis.
>
>I've always seen the latter used.
I picked up the word from 19th and early 20th C. Dutch Indonesianist
literature, and recall seeing both spellings _there_, and I think in English
work too. Of course, we could call it _trema_ ....
In any case, it was used a lot in describing Ind. languages, mostly to
indicate glottal stop e.g. aä [a?a]. Also, since many Dutch writers
perversely refused for a long time to use"u" for [u], preferring instead
"oe", it was how they distinguished /oe/ "oë" from /u/. Frequent omission
by the typesetters/proofreaders makes wordlists of the era a little
difficult to interpret.