Re: Trema (was: French spelling scheme)

Raymond Brown wrote:


> The trouble is, of course, a-umlaut and u-umlaut are also commonly used to
> mean 'a with trema' and 'u with trema', and I've certainly come across
> i-umlaut used to mean 'i with trema' where, of course, no umlaut is
> involved - it's diaeresis!  Ach y fi!
Exactly.  "So this o-umlaut is here because of i-umlaut" is a sentence
I've actually (more or less) heard.

> English: Brontë /brQnti/  (a surname)
This is a bit of a synthetic example:  Patrick Brunty, from Ireland,
changed his name to "Brontë" because he thought it looked niftier;
he then passed it to his daughters, Charlotte, Anne, and Emily.

More usual English examples are "coöperate" and "naïve", although
"co-operate" or even "cooperate" (shudder, obviously /kup@reit/!)
and "naive" are far more common nowadays.

> As for why the Hellenist Greek grammarians used a double-dot, I don't know.
I don't think anyone does.

--
There is / one art             || John Cowan <jcowan@...>
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