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Perhpas a list of keyboard shortcuts might be included at the end of the page to help those typing?
I agree. They'd be easy to add. Wikifan4 ( talk) 19:08, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
Since Umlaut is a German word, I always assumed that it specifically refers to the ä ö ü letters and sounds of German. The article presents German only as one example. What would be examples of umlauts in other languages? --AxelBoldt
Umlauts are used in many Germanic languages. E.g. fräulein in German and fröken in Swedish. As far as I know it's still called an umlaut. Also umlaut has TWO meanings: the inflected vowel and the diacritical mark itself. Both are "umlauts". I.e. ö is an "umlaut" and so are the two little dots above it. -RobertL30. Of course, whadiknow, I just took German for 6 years. We might actually need a native speaker to help clear up confusion.
That won't do, because I am a native German speaker... :-) For me, the three letters and sounds referred to above are "umlauts"; I wouldn't call the two dots by themselves an umlaut. But maybe the word "umlaut" is used differently and broader in English. --AxelBoldt
It is my understanding that English-speaking linguists use the term for the process of vowel change as described, and that using the term for the dots themselves is a "popular" use that just caught on. Some linguists would call the English man/men change an umlaut, and also tooth/teeth, etc. I think I'll take another stab at this one. --LDC
LDC is correct in that the term "umlaut" is used in linguistics to describe vowel changes used to generate rule-governed changes in meaning. All Semitic languages, such as Arabic, use umlaut in their word-formation processes.
Umlaut is also used to describe anticipatory vowel harmony. My impression (as a non-expert) is that this generally occurs in languages like German that match the frontness of a vowel to the frontness of some (or all) grammatical suffixes. Linguists who study this subject reserve "vowel harmony" proper for progressive vowel harmony, in which the presence of a vowel (or category of vowels) determines what other vowel(s) can occur in the following syllables of a word. Progressive nasalization, found in some South American languages, is also an example of a type of vowel harmony.
The use of affixes to mark these same types of grammatical changes is called ablaut. Thus, the transformations {man ~ men}, {mouse ~ mice}, and {goose ~ geese} are all examples of umlaut, while {cat ~ cats}, {dog ~ dogs}, and {house ~ houses} are all examples of ablaut.
Hope that helps. pgdudda
Isn't the umlaut (as graphical symbol) just an abbreviated form of the diphthong, e.g. "ö" for "oe". -- Egil 07:46 Mar 10, 2003 (UTC)
I have a hard time understanding this
Does this mean that in the original definition, a change of vowel was called "umlaut" only if the following syllable had an "i" or "j", but in today's definition this is no longer required? AxelBoldt 02:17 Apr 28, 2003 (UTC)
The Turkish language has ö and ü, pronounced identically to German. Does Turkish have a name for these characters? -- GCarty
While traveling in Europe a year or two ago I was investigating the terminology and found the German word "Zweipunkt" (meaning simply "two dots") used. I'd like to say that it was in the Duden Rechtschreibung book but I really can't be sure. -- hippietrail
Umlaut, the opposite of the ablaut, is the migration of a back vowel to the front of the mouth. Generally, this is accompanied by a rounding of the lips.
Umlaut is primarily an effect, not a mark. Such examples deriving from old English would be whole/heal, tooth/teeth, doom/deem. This is an effect that results from vowel harmony (not a typical Indo-European phenomenon) by having an i or a j after the stem of the word, affecting the behavior of the stem vowel, while itself generally disappearing.
Umlaut is the German and (borrowed) English word for this. The mark (the two dots) that is referred to in German as an umlaut is normally referred to in English as a diaresis, a borrowed usage from French that separates two consecutive vowels into two separate syllables (i.e. coöperate). -- Hanseaticacid
I've been bold and cut the two paragraphs below: they seem confused (confused me, anyway), and unhelpfully to mix POV and irrelevance:
There are a few exceptions where German oe or ue do not represent ö and ü, respectively. So you cannot replace them "back" to an umlaut beause they never was one. For example, Tuer [t'u:@r, t'u:6] ("doer", quiet uncommon) and Tür [ty:r] ("door") are distinct; soeben [zO'e:b@n, zO'e:bn=] ("just now") has three syllables and is not söben; Otto von Guericke [g'e:rIk@] is not Güricke (this proper name stems from French). German does not use the diaeresis on the e to distinguish disyllabic oe from ö because most occurrences are well known or a clear compound word (e.g. soeben, Bauentscheidung is a compound of Bau and Entscheidung etc.)
Foreign words would keep their diaeresis (e.g. Alëuten or Citroën) but most Germans would not pronounce them correctly with or without the diaeresis, so the diaeresis can be omitted. (However, dropping the umlaut as is done by non-German speakers should never be done, as it can change a word’s meaning.)
Markalexander100 03:21, 13 May 2004 (UTC)
The first paragraph isn't really about umlauts at all- it just says that words which don't have umlauts, and which no-one would think about adding umlauts to, should not have umlauts added. I don't think we need to spell that out. Markalexander100 01:36, 19 May 2004 (UTC)
With proper names, I can see you might have a point, although I've never come across it myself. With ordinary words, one would only have a problem if someone who didn't speak German, but knew a (dangerously) little about German orthography, was retyping some German text. I don't think that's likely. Markalexander100 01:39, 20 May 2004 (UTC)
i have edited this article by removing the incorrect references to welsh, viz.: "The Welsh language uses an umlaut when a vowel is doubled, as in seremonïau (sermoni-iau)." although vowel gradation does exist in welsh, this is not an instance of it, nor is it indicated by the 'umlaut' diacritic mark. the example given is an instance of the way diaeresis is used in welsh much along the same lines as it is used in french to disambiguate vowel sequences with hiatus from dipthongs with [j] spelled <i> as correctly stated on the welsh entry in the relevant article on diareses: " Welsh also uses the accent for this purpose, with the diaeresis usually indicating the stressed vowel"
Since no-one has contributed here for over a year, I take it the page is not a controvertial one. On that basis I allow myself to "be bold" and rewrite the section on vowel mutation completely without asking for a consensus first. This section was facutally correct, but rather muddled - material belonging in one paragraph was scattered all over the place - and with too much focus on questions of German pronunciation, for which there is a separate article. Apart from that, it seemed to me that it would be difficult for a beginner to understand the explanations as they stood. The one thing which was positively misleading was the implication that Umlaut is primarily a marker of grammatical function. It is a historical development which left in its wake a vowel distinction which SOMETIMES took on grammatical significance.
I don't want to get into rewriting the Hebrew business further down the page, but I doubt very much if a Hebrew jot is even remotely similar to the umlaut diacritic. But Hebrew does have umlaut in the sense of vowel mutation, and it would be good if someone expert on Semitics could add an example. -- Doric Loon 22:40, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)
This article describes 2 different things with the same name. Should be split into separate articles. — ishwar (SPEAK) 15:37, 2005 Mar 31 (UTC)
-- Jordi· ✆ 18:30, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Hi. I am not referring to orthography. Just the phonological process. Irregardless of the origin of the term, the term is used to refer to a specific type of long distance vowel assimilation in any language, namely regressive assimilation (a.k.a. anticipatory or right to left assimilation). There are two usages: (1) umlaut = regressive vowel harmony or (2) regressive vowel harmony in Germanic languages. Both of the usages are found in linguistic literature.
The term i-mutation is only used for Germanic. For instance, in Nez Perce "dominant' vowels, /a, o, i/, cause "recessive" vowels to assimilate. I-mutation could not apply here. One would have to call this a-o-i-mutation.
If the term umlaut is not used, then the alternate terminology is regressive vowel harmony (a.k.a. regressive metaphony) or anticipatory vowel harmony (a.k.a. anticipatory metaphony) or right-to-left vowel harmony (a.k.a. right-to-left metaphony).
Yes, the article describes umlaut in Germanic languages while neglecting other language families. This is why I am writing a note here.
I am thinking that since the article discusses (1) a particular phonological process and (2) a particular orthographic symbol, there should be two separate treatments on different pages. Cheers. — ishwar (SPEAK) 13:45, 2005 Apr 1 (UTC)
I dont know much about the German terminology but here is a book that uses the term a-umlaut:
So umlaut is used to refer to non-i-umlaut processes.
Regarding non-Germanic languages, umlaut is used to refer any regressive assimilation involving any vowel—not just assimilation involving [i].
As I mentioned above (but in less detail), there is a usage among some linguists, to use the terms
Here are some definitions from Trask (1993, 1996) that may help us in this discussion.
from (Trask 1993):
from (Trask 1996):
Regarding the terms left-to-right and right-to-left, I cant control the usage of these since they are used by not only me but by the general linguistic community. But, you have a nice observation about the bias of these terms. I never thought about this before. I have only seen phonetic transcription written in the usual European direction (although I do know of one person who has created a notational system that leaves the visual direction irrelevant by using directional arrows).
Anyway, perhaps, no one will agree to a page split. Even so, the article is not very comprehensive and slightly incorrect/misleading in some aspects. Peace. — ishwar (SPEAK) 17:33, 2005 Apr 14 (UTC)
Just in case this is helpful to anyone. — ishwar (SPEAK) 17:58, 2005 Apr 14 (UTC)
Germanic | Old English | Modern English | |
Sing | *mūs | mūs | [maʊs] 'mouse' |
Pl | *mūsi | mīs | [maɪs] 'mice' |
Sing | *fōt | fōt | [fʊt] 'foot' |
Pl | *fōti | fēt | [fɪːt] 'feet' |
If anone wants to add this to the table the modern german words are: Maus, Mäuse, Fuss, Füsse (correct: Fuß, Füße)
Ishwar, this is useful, and has cost you quite a lot of work, so thanks. The table with Germanic forms of mouse and foot is good, and if you agree, I would like to move it into the article proper.
As far as the semantic range of "umlaut" is concerned, I have to say your evidence is persuasive. I had heard the phrase "a-umlaut" before, but I thought it was just someone making a rogue analogy. Seems to be more common than that. So to that extent you are right.
However, it seems to me that when we have such a wealth of terms, and have so many distinctions to make, it is good to match the terms to the distinctions, and your last quote from Trask suggests a good example of this: umlaut and affection are synonymous, but typically one uses umlaut for Germanic and affection for Celtic. This isn't just him, or just me - there is a general (and very positive) tendency to be as specific as possible with these terms, and I do think we should follow that tendency, even if you have proved that it is not universal.
Again, I would recommend we put a note here saying that the term "umlaut" is sometimes used for lots of other kinds of vowel harmony, and then make a new and separate article under whichever term you like best, and discuss all sorts of vowel harmony phenomena there.
By the way, who is Task? I am very worried about his suggestion that there is any similarity at all between umlaut and ablaut. That doesn't sound to me like an authority. But the title of his book obviously claims to be one. -- Doric Loon 19:54, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I have just modified this section, and I hope it is an improvement. The point is, the diacritic can only be called "umlaut" in German (where it indicates the umlaut phenomenon proper) or in languages which have borrowed it from German. Someone needs to check the history of the other languages mentioned here. I know that Turkish borrowed from German, but in some of the other cases the history may be different. If it is, they do not belong in this article. -- Doric Loon 10:17, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I have added a couple of categories. However, it seems to me that the whole category thing is very messy. Is it helpful to have all these separate categories covering much the same ground? As long as we have them, a key article like this must be listed in all of them, but I would be very happy if someone wanted to rationalise these in some way. -- Doric Loon 12:30, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)
A few weeks ago we debated splitting this article. At that time I thought this was unnecessary, because the article was fairly well balanced. However, now User Benwing has written a new article on umlaut under the title i-mutation, which broadly overlaps with the the first half of this article, though it very laudibly tries to go into more depth. Some kind of resolution of this will be necessary, and I think it will possibly involve merging the new article into the first part of the Umlaut article. But then the Umlaut article will be much longer and will after all need to be split. Can I suggest those of you who have a stake in this article have a look at Talk:I-mutation and record your views there? -- Doric Loon 18:24, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I believe the ISBN template belongs in the article, no? But a simple Amazon search would have been easier than all of this. -- SKopp 09:37, 11 May 2005 (UTC)
Is there any reason why inherently funny word is in the See also section. That article makes no reference to umlaut. Samw 28 June 2005 23:46 (UTC)
I think its the wrong plase to ask, but I don't know a better place for it: If I see a misspelled german word (no dots), should I replace it or will that cause errors when viewing it in a browser? -- Blah(de) 19:10, 19 October 2005 (UTC)
as the article gets longer, there is no reason to keep two separate topics bundled here. "typographical umlaut" is merely the orthographical means to express (some) umlauted vowels in German. The diacritic has other uses, and when used independently of German, it is more properly referred to as diaeresis (in English and Greek, for example; coërxion, coöperation). dab (ᛏ) 19:10, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
Good, I've been thinking for a while this was necessary. -- Doric Loon 13:46, 7 March 2006 (UTC)
After that useful split, it is possibly time to complete the proposals I made earlier. SO, would any of you mind if I move this article to Germanic Umlaut and create a disambiguation page at Umlaut? -- Doric Loon 10:57, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
OK, since there have been no objections, and since this was mooted before and there were no objections then either, I see no reason to wait. Here goes. -- Doric Loon 20:10, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
Quite right! -- Doric Loon 13:44, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
hm, sorry to be late, but that move wasn't a very good idea. umlaut is used for this sort of vowel affection in all sorts of languages, not just Germanic. This article treats the phenomenon in general, and is now mis-titled. dab (ᛏ) 14:54, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
It says that the only spelling problems occur with 'ä' & 'e'. But aren't 'ü' and 'y' pronounced the same? Cameron Nedland 14:52, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
Only seldom it is found in a word which does not have a non-umlauted counterpart: rare examples are schön.... If this is trying to say what it sounds like, the author has forgotten about schon. If it's trying to say something else, it should be said completely differently. -- Espoo 09:53, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
Dbachmann, I have just reverted a whole series of edits of yours - sorry, I hesitated to do this because you obviously spent a lot of time on it, and your edits are normally good. In this case, there are several issues. First, I think you misunderstand the term "Rückumlaut". The point is not that anyone ever thought that Umlaut took place in the past tense and then was reversed, I don't think. The "Rück" idea is not diachronic. Rather, if you take the dictionary form as the starting point, you get the illusion of it working back the way. You are right that it is a misleading term, but it is rather cute just the same, and I don't mind keeping it. Secondly, I don't think the current opinion IS that the j disappeared before Umlaut took place. The umlaut in the present tense of "think" took place because of the j. The reason there was never Umlaut in the past tense is because the past tense never had a j. Third issue, why delete the paragraph on strong verbs? I think it is useful to show that fangen > fängt is not Ablaut. Doric Loon ( talk) 05:36, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
In the present-day languages, and particularly German, the basic difference between umlaut and ablaut as forms of vowel mutation is that ablaut is arbitrary and umlaut predictable. It is predictable in two senses: a) you know when it will (or is likely to) happen, and you know what will happen. For example, in German a neuter noun whose plural ends in -er will always have its vowel (a/o/u) mutated, and it will always be mutated in one particular way. Thus Dorf-> Dörfer. You know the vowel will change and you know it won't be Darfer. By contrast families of words such as Mahlen/Mühle/Mehl or Licht/Leuchte or indeed the strong verbs, the vowel changes (whatever the historical reason) now have all the appearance of being totally arbitrary. This is a significant point and deserves mention. Escoville ( talk) 16:24, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
To pick semantics: It's not the basic difference, but it is a key consequence of their essentially different origins. The basic difference is that of those origins, not of that very important consequence and its great impact on learning Germanic languages. If you had to learn two vowel rotations, we'd be out of business. :) ᛭ LokiClock ( talk) 04:59, 11 June 2010 (UTC)
Umlaut is used, very popularly in at least North Germanic linguistics, to refer to other types of mutation, such as the u-mutation that created Å. This article states that umlaut is specifically a type of i-mutation. In the North Germanic case, the recognition of both u-umlaut and i-umlaut, if not also a-umlaut, is fundamental due to the entanglement of the front u-umlauts and back i-umlauts, mergers most usually considered to have taken place before umlaut became distinctive. They are truly two halves of a whole. So it is important to uphold this inclusion of other types of umlaut, and not just to reflect common practice. ᛭ LokiClock ( talk) 18:50, 13 June 2010 (UTC)
I don't think it's out of the question to just retitle the Old Norse section "Umlaut in Old Norse" and open with a sentence about how, unlike in the other languages, Old Norse umlaut involves multiple mutations. Then any exclusive sentences can be adjusted without failing to communicate that it was most widely an i-mutation. ᛭ LokiClock ( talk) 06:48, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
This term is meaningless. A non-phonological sound change is an oxymoron. I'd assume phonemic is meant, but the Old Norse statement remains confusing or inaccurate. Even if it's meant that the one umlaut produces vowels purely by allophonic alternation, those vowels don't stop being phonemic. When one says that a sound change has become phonemic it means that the sounds before and after the process have become distinct, not that the sound change itself represents a system of alternation between phonemes and not between allophones. Ablaut, for example, is not a phonemic sound change because it was never an allophonic sound change.
The statement in question:
The situation in Old Norse is complicated as there are two forms of i-mutation. Of these two, only one is phonologized.
᛭ LokiClock ( talk) 03:20, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
This article begins as follows:
What is a "following vowel"? Michael Hardy ( talk) 16:41, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
Hey guys, dude from Antwerp/Belgium here, I saw some minor mistakes in the section on Dutch (which is also the majority language in Belgium) but since I don't feel secure enough to start editting it myself, I'll post here and see what you guys have to say about it or if y'all are proficient enough in English & wiki'ing to edit it yerselves.
"that long vowels and diphthongs were not affected by umlaut in the more western dialects, including those in Brabant and Holland that were most influential for standard Dutch." -> it is rather "Flanders and Holland" (and Zeeland). "Flanders" here in the historical meaning ( County of Flanders), now +- the provinces West Flanders and East Flanders. Not the current sense of Flanders, being the whole Dutch-speaking part of Belgium.
I wouldn't know how to shortly get that into the article lol.
Most Brabantian dialects *do* have extensive umlauting - especially on long ô, which is the example used in the article; only a small corner bordering to Holland (and under heavy linguistic influence from there) has forms without umlaut. (the old Markiezaat of Bergen op Zoom; see also Lords and margraves of Bergen op Zoom Except for this area (with smaller cities like Bergen op Zoom, Steenbergen, Roosendaal), Brabantian dialects have the form 'vulen' instead of 'voelen', pronounced /vy:lë/, or alternatively /vylə/ (North Brabant) or with vowel opening /vø:lə/ (Flemish Brabant).
This area includes all major (historical) Brabantian cities, like Antwerp, Brussels, Leuven, Breda (it's older, traditional dialect at least), Mechelen, Den Bosch, Eindhoven, Tilburg etc.
A dialect map of the word "green" (st. Dutch groen /grun/, Brabantian gruun /gry:n/ and var.) can be found here: http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/origineel.php?origineel=daan001atla01_01_scan0008
The dots indicate dialects without umlaut (=groen /grun/), the other symbols various results of umlaut like /gry:n/, /gryn/, /grø:n/, /grøyn/; and Frisian (horizontal rectangles): grien /gri.ən/
So while it's true that the umlaut-less forms of Standard Dutch are based on western forms, these are not the Brabantian ones (the big influence of Brab. dialects on the standard language is another myth, but that's for another time; Flemish dialects have had much bigger impact, as a.o. the lack of umlauts show)
(some examples from my native Antwerp dialect; with the exception of the North-West corner of North Brabant, these go for *all* of the Brabantian dialects, with /y:/ sometimes as /y/ (North) or /ø:/ (South):
long *â: cheese/kaas /kε:s/; shear/schaar /schε:r/; suffix -aar < Latin -ârius /εr/, /ε:r/
I could name many more; almsot all instances of long ô and many of â have umlaut where it's expected.
Uml. of the Gmc. diphthong */au/ is a bit rarer, and only exists in the eastern half of old Brabant. Some relics of umlauts in diminutives also exist mostly in this eastern half, but umlauts in strong verbs only remain in a few neighbouring villages with Limburg, where these are stll very common.
Cheers, Diederik, Antwerp.
PS the reason why I didn't want to edit this myself is, as you can see, that the way I explain it turns out very unnecessarily long and incoherent ;) — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
84.197.115.157 (
talk)
11:47, 10 June 2011 (UTC)
Shouldn't it be mentioned that the umlaut is two dots above the letter? Seems that there is no description in the introduction of how the umlaut is actually written. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.240.79.226 ( talk) 17:36, 5 February 2012 (UTC)
From the text it seems like "Loss of final '-z'" should result in *fōtiz -> *fōti and not *fōtiz -> *fēti.
Process | Language | Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Original form | Proto-Germanic | *mūs | *mūsiz | *fōts | *fōtiz |
Loss of final -z | West Germanic | *mūs | *mūsi | *fōt | *fōti |
jsnx ( talk) 14:29, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
It is unfortunate, that it is not recognized in the article that Turkish and other Turkic languages have also Umlauts. In Turkish language, they use ö and ü, in Turkmen language, there is also a ü. In Hungarian they us ő for the ö -- 49.147.189.182 ( talk) 05:00, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
Could we have a citation, please, for the claim that Umlaut in Germanic verbs is widely known as "False Ablaut", and that that is not just somebody's personal pet tag? Otherwise I intend to remove that information. -- Doric Loon ( talk) 20:40, 25 May 2014 (UTC)
I've been a speaker of Afrikaans all my life, and am also fluent in English and German. I have noticed that umlaut is absent in Afrikaans, after it descended from Dutch, except for maybe a few "leftovers," like "gedagte" (thought, noun). Am I correct, or does Afrikaans have it's own Umlaut of some sort? From what I've known, the answer is no. Do I stand corrected? Shalin1234 ( talk) 21:26, 3 November 2018 (UTC)
I am currently trying to explain to an English speaker how he should write my last name and just wanted to send him a link with an explanation. That's how I come up with following suggestion: I would love to have a section about the alternative writing of umlauts, ie. ue instead of ü. In particular, authorities always insist to write my name with an u instead of ü and ignore my explantation. It would be awesome if there would be a clear section (without scanning the whole article) about the alternative writing so I can pinpoint everyone who insist to write my name with an u. PS. I did not want to just add a section since I know how fast a contestation on Wikipedia is started. -- Zubi 00:51, 21 April 2019 (UTC)
The article states that "took place separately in various Germanic languages starting around 450 or 500 CE." This is almost certainly wrong, and neither of the two referenced articles for this sentence mention any dates at all. Perhaps it is a typo and BCE was meant.
I don't feel expert enough to assert a different date, but would appreciate someone with more background taking a look. Sean.pk.mcgrath ( talk) 11:56, 20 May 2024 (UTC)
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Perhpas a list of keyboard shortcuts might be included at the end of the page to help those typing?
I agree. They'd be easy to add. Wikifan4 ( talk) 19:08, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
Since Umlaut is a German word, I always assumed that it specifically refers to the ä ö ü letters and sounds of German. The article presents German only as one example. What would be examples of umlauts in other languages? --AxelBoldt
Umlauts are used in many Germanic languages. E.g. fräulein in German and fröken in Swedish. As far as I know it's still called an umlaut. Also umlaut has TWO meanings: the inflected vowel and the diacritical mark itself. Both are "umlauts". I.e. ö is an "umlaut" and so are the two little dots above it. -RobertL30. Of course, whadiknow, I just took German for 6 years. We might actually need a native speaker to help clear up confusion.
That won't do, because I am a native German speaker... :-) For me, the three letters and sounds referred to above are "umlauts"; I wouldn't call the two dots by themselves an umlaut. But maybe the word "umlaut" is used differently and broader in English. --AxelBoldt
It is my understanding that English-speaking linguists use the term for the process of vowel change as described, and that using the term for the dots themselves is a "popular" use that just caught on. Some linguists would call the English man/men change an umlaut, and also tooth/teeth, etc. I think I'll take another stab at this one. --LDC
LDC is correct in that the term "umlaut" is used in linguistics to describe vowel changes used to generate rule-governed changes in meaning. All Semitic languages, such as Arabic, use umlaut in their word-formation processes.
Umlaut is also used to describe anticipatory vowel harmony. My impression (as a non-expert) is that this generally occurs in languages like German that match the frontness of a vowel to the frontness of some (or all) grammatical suffixes. Linguists who study this subject reserve "vowel harmony" proper for progressive vowel harmony, in which the presence of a vowel (or category of vowels) determines what other vowel(s) can occur in the following syllables of a word. Progressive nasalization, found in some South American languages, is also an example of a type of vowel harmony.
The use of affixes to mark these same types of grammatical changes is called ablaut. Thus, the transformations {man ~ men}, {mouse ~ mice}, and {goose ~ geese} are all examples of umlaut, while {cat ~ cats}, {dog ~ dogs}, and {house ~ houses} are all examples of ablaut.
Hope that helps. pgdudda
Isn't the umlaut (as graphical symbol) just an abbreviated form of the diphthong, e.g. "ö" for "oe". -- Egil 07:46 Mar 10, 2003 (UTC)
I have a hard time understanding this
Does this mean that in the original definition, a change of vowel was called "umlaut" only if the following syllable had an "i" or "j", but in today's definition this is no longer required? AxelBoldt 02:17 Apr 28, 2003 (UTC)
The Turkish language has ö and ü, pronounced identically to German. Does Turkish have a name for these characters? -- GCarty
While traveling in Europe a year or two ago I was investigating the terminology and found the German word "Zweipunkt" (meaning simply "two dots") used. I'd like to say that it was in the Duden Rechtschreibung book but I really can't be sure. -- hippietrail
Umlaut, the opposite of the ablaut, is the migration of a back vowel to the front of the mouth. Generally, this is accompanied by a rounding of the lips.
Umlaut is primarily an effect, not a mark. Such examples deriving from old English would be whole/heal, tooth/teeth, doom/deem. This is an effect that results from vowel harmony (not a typical Indo-European phenomenon) by having an i or a j after the stem of the word, affecting the behavior of the stem vowel, while itself generally disappearing.
Umlaut is the German and (borrowed) English word for this. The mark (the two dots) that is referred to in German as an umlaut is normally referred to in English as a diaresis, a borrowed usage from French that separates two consecutive vowels into two separate syllables (i.e. coöperate). -- Hanseaticacid
I've been bold and cut the two paragraphs below: they seem confused (confused me, anyway), and unhelpfully to mix POV and irrelevance:
There are a few exceptions where German oe or ue do not represent ö and ü, respectively. So you cannot replace them "back" to an umlaut beause they never was one. For example, Tuer [t'u:@r, t'u:6] ("doer", quiet uncommon) and Tür [ty:r] ("door") are distinct; soeben [zO'e:b@n, zO'e:bn=] ("just now") has three syllables and is not söben; Otto von Guericke [g'e:rIk@] is not Güricke (this proper name stems from French). German does not use the diaeresis on the e to distinguish disyllabic oe from ö because most occurrences are well known or a clear compound word (e.g. soeben, Bauentscheidung is a compound of Bau and Entscheidung etc.)
Foreign words would keep their diaeresis (e.g. Alëuten or Citroën) but most Germans would not pronounce them correctly with or without the diaeresis, so the diaeresis can be omitted. (However, dropping the umlaut as is done by non-German speakers should never be done, as it can change a word’s meaning.)
Markalexander100 03:21, 13 May 2004 (UTC)
The first paragraph isn't really about umlauts at all- it just says that words which don't have umlauts, and which no-one would think about adding umlauts to, should not have umlauts added. I don't think we need to spell that out. Markalexander100 01:36, 19 May 2004 (UTC)
With proper names, I can see you might have a point, although I've never come across it myself. With ordinary words, one would only have a problem if someone who didn't speak German, but knew a (dangerously) little about German orthography, was retyping some German text. I don't think that's likely. Markalexander100 01:39, 20 May 2004 (UTC)
i have edited this article by removing the incorrect references to welsh, viz.: "The Welsh language uses an umlaut when a vowel is doubled, as in seremonïau (sermoni-iau)." although vowel gradation does exist in welsh, this is not an instance of it, nor is it indicated by the 'umlaut' diacritic mark. the example given is an instance of the way diaeresis is used in welsh much along the same lines as it is used in french to disambiguate vowel sequences with hiatus from dipthongs with [j] spelled <i> as correctly stated on the welsh entry in the relevant article on diareses: " Welsh also uses the accent for this purpose, with the diaeresis usually indicating the stressed vowel"
Since no-one has contributed here for over a year, I take it the page is not a controvertial one. On that basis I allow myself to "be bold" and rewrite the section on vowel mutation completely without asking for a consensus first. This section was facutally correct, but rather muddled - material belonging in one paragraph was scattered all over the place - and with too much focus on questions of German pronunciation, for which there is a separate article. Apart from that, it seemed to me that it would be difficult for a beginner to understand the explanations as they stood. The one thing which was positively misleading was the implication that Umlaut is primarily a marker of grammatical function. It is a historical development which left in its wake a vowel distinction which SOMETIMES took on grammatical significance.
I don't want to get into rewriting the Hebrew business further down the page, but I doubt very much if a Hebrew jot is even remotely similar to the umlaut diacritic. But Hebrew does have umlaut in the sense of vowel mutation, and it would be good if someone expert on Semitics could add an example. -- Doric Loon 22:40, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)
This article describes 2 different things with the same name. Should be split into separate articles. — ishwar (SPEAK) 15:37, 2005 Mar 31 (UTC)
-- Jordi· ✆ 18:30, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Hi. I am not referring to orthography. Just the phonological process. Irregardless of the origin of the term, the term is used to refer to a specific type of long distance vowel assimilation in any language, namely regressive assimilation (a.k.a. anticipatory or right to left assimilation). There are two usages: (1) umlaut = regressive vowel harmony or (2) regressive vowel harmony in Germanic languages. Both of the usages are found in linguistic literature.
The term i-mutation is only used for Germanic. For instance, in Nez Perce "dominant' vowels, /a, o, i/, cause "recessive" vowels to assimilate. I-mutation could not apply here. One would have to call this a-o-i-mutation.
If the term umlaut is not used, then the alternate terminology is regressive vowel harmony (a.k.a. regressive metaphony) or anticipatory vowel harmony (a.k.a. anticipatory metaphony) or right-to-left vowel harmony (a.k.a. right-to-left metaphony).
Yes, the article describes umlaut in Germanic languages while neglecting other language families. This is why I am writing a note here.
I am thinking that since the article discusses (1) a particular phonological process and (2) a particular orthographic symbol, there should be two separate treatments on different pages. Cheers. — ishwar (SPEAK) 13:45, 2005 Apr 1 (UTC)
I dont know much about the German terminology but here is a book that uses the term a-umlaut:
So umlaut is used to refer to non-i-umlaut processes.
Regarding non-Germanic languages, umlaut is used to refer any regressive assimilation involving any vowel—not just assimilation involving [i].
As I mentioned above (but in less detail), there is a usage among some linguists, to use the terms
Here are some definitions from Trask (1993, 1996) that may help us in this discussion.
from (Trask 1993):
from (Trask 1996):
Regarding the terms left-to-right and right-to-left, I cant control the usage of these since they are used by not only me but by the general linguistic community. But, you have a nice observation about the bias of these terms. I never thought about this before. I have only seen phonetic transcription written in the usual European direction (although I do know of one person who has created a notational system that leaves the visual direction irrelevant by using directional arrows).
Anyway, perhaps, no one will agree to a page split. Even so, the article is not very comprehensive and slightly incorrect/misleading in some aspects. Peace. — ishwar (SPEAK) 17:33, 2005 Apr 14 (UTC)
Just in case this is helpful to anyone. — ishwar (SPEAK) 17:58, 2005 Apr 14 (UTC)
Germanic | Old English | Modern English | |
Sing | *mūs | mūs | [maʊs] 'mouse' |
Pl | *mūsi | mīs | [maɪs] 'mice' |
Sing | *fōt | fōt | [fʊt] 'foot' |
Pl | *fōti | fēt | [fɪːt] 'feet' |
If anone wants to add this to the table the modern german words are: Maus, Mäuse, Fuss, Füsse (correct: Fuß, Füße)
Ishwar, this is useful, and has cost you quite a lot of work, so thanks. The table with Germanic forms of mouse and foot is good, and if you agree, I would like to move it into the article proper.
As far as the semantic range of "umlaut" is concerned, I have to say your evidence is persuasive. I had heard the phrase "a-umlaut" before, but I thought it was just someone making a rogue analogy. Seems to be more common than that. So to that extent you are right.
However, it seems to me that when we have such a wealth of terms, and have so many distinctions to make, it is good to match the terms to the distinctions, and your last quote from Trask suggests a good example of this: umlaut and affection are synonymous, but typically one uses umlaut for Germanic and affection for Celtic. This isn't just him, or just me - there is a general (and very positive) tendency to be as specific as possible with these terms, and I do think we should follow that tendency, even if you have proved that it is not universal.
Again, I would recommend we put a note here saying that the term "umlaut" is sometimes used for lots of other kinds of vowel harmony, and then make a new and separate article under whichever term you like best, and discuss all sorts of vowel harmony phenomena there.
By the way, who is Task? I am very worried about his suggestion that there is any similarity at all between umlaut and ablaut. That doesn't sound to me like an authority. But the title of his book obviously claims to be one. -- Doric Loon 19:54, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I have just modified this section, and I hope it is an improvement. The point is, the diacritic can only be called "umlaut" in German (where it indicates the umlaut phenomenon proper) or in languages which have borrowed it from German. Someone needs to check the history of the other languages mentioned here. I know that Turkish borrowed from German, but in some of the other cases the history may be different. If it is, they do not belong in this article. -- Doric Loon 10:17, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I have added a couple of categories. However, it seems to me that the whole category thing is very messy. Is it helpful to have all these separate categories covering much the same ground? As long as we have them, a key article like this must be listed in all of them, but I would be very happy if someone wanted to rationalise these in some way. -- Doric Loon 12:30, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)
A few weeks ago we debated splitting this article. At that time I thought this was unnecessary, because the article was fairly well balanced. However, now User Benwing has written a new article on umlaut under the title i-mutation, which broadly overlaps with the the first half of this article, though it very laudibly tries to go into more depth. Some kind of resolution of this will be necessary, and I think it will possibly involve merging the new article into the first part of the Umlaut article. But then the Umlaut article will be much longer and will after all need to be split. Can I suggest those of you who have a stake in this article have a look at Talk:I-mutation and record your views there? -- Doric Loon 18:24, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I believe the ISBN template belongs in the article, no? But a simple Amazon search would have been easier than all of this. -- SKopp 09:37, 11 May 2005 (UTC)
Is there any reason why inherently funny word is in the See also section. That article makes no reference to umlaut. Samw 28 June 2005 23:46 (UTC)
I think its the wrong plase to ask, but I don't know a better place for it: If I see a misspelled german word (no dots), should I replace it or will that cause errors when viewing it in a browser? -- Blah(de) 19:10, 19 October 2005 (UTC)
as the article gets longer, there is no reason to keep two separate topics bundled here. "typographical umlaut" is merely the orthographical means to express (some) umlauted vowels in German. The diacritic has other uses, and when used independently of German, it is more properly referred to as diaeresis (in English and Greek, for example; coërxion, coöperation). dab (ᛏ) 19:10, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
Good, I've been thinking for a while this was necessary. -- Doric Loon 13:46, 7 March 2006 (UTC)
After that useful split, it is possibly time to complete the proposals I made earlier. SO, would any of you mind if I move this article to Germanic Umlaut and create a disambiguation page at Umlaut? -- Doric Loon 10:57, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
OK, since there have been no objections, and since this was mooted before and there were no objections then either, I see no reason to wait. Here goes. -- Doric Loon 20:10, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
Quite right! -- Doric Loon 13:44, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
hm, sorry to be late, but that move wasn't a very good idea. umlaut is used for this sort of vowel affection in all sorts of languages, not just Germanic. This article treats the phenomenon in general, and is now mis-titled. dab (ᛏ) 14:54, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
It says that the only spelling problems occur with 'ä' & 'e'. But aren't 'ü' and 'y' pronounced the same? Cameron Nedland 14:52, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
Only seldom it is found in a word which does not have a non-umlauted counterpart: rare examples are schön.... If this is trying to say what it sounds like, the author has forgotten about schon. If it's trying to say something else, it should be said completely differently. -- Espoo 09:53, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
Dbachmann, I have just reverted a whole series of edits of yours - sorry, I hesitated to do this because you obviously spent a lot of time on it, and your edits are normally good. In this case, there are several issues. First, I think you misunderstand the term "Rückumlaut". The point is not that anyone ever thought that Umlaut took place in the past tense and then was reversed, I don't think. The "Rück" idea is not diachronic. Rather, if you take the dictionary form as the starting point, you get the illusion of it working back the way. You are right that it is a misleading term, but it is rather cute just the same, and I don't mind keeping it. Secondly, I don't think the current opinion IS that the j disappeared before Umlaut took place. The umlaut in the present tense of "think" took place because of the j. The reason there was never Umlaut in the past tense is because the past tense never had a j. Third issue, why delete the paragraph on strong verbs? I think it is useful to show that fangen > fängt is not Ablaut. Doric Loon ( talk) 05:36, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
In the present-day languages, and particularly German, the basic difference between umlaut and ablaut as forms of vowel mutation is that ablaut is arbitrary and umlaut predictable. It is predictable in two senses: a) you know when it will (or is likely to) happen, and you know what will happen. For example, in German a neuter noun whose plural ends in -er will always have its vowel (a/o/u) mutated, and it will always be mutated in one particular way. Thus Dorf-> Dörfer. You know the vowel will change and you know it won't be Darfer. By contrast families of words such as Mahlen/Mühle/Mehl or Licht/Leuchte or indeed the strong verbs, the vowel changes (whatever the historical reason) now have all the appearance of being totally arbitrary. This is a significant point and deserves mention. Escoville ( talk) 16:24, 3 November 2009 (UTC)
To pick semantics: It's not the basic difference, but it is a key consequence of their essentially different origins. The basic difference is that of those origins, not of that very important consequence and its great impact on learning Germanic languages. If you had to learn two vowel rotations, we'd be out of business. :) ᛭ LokiClock ( talk) 04:59, 11 June 2010 (UTC)
Umlaut is used, very popularly in at least North Germanic linguistics, to refer to other types of mutation, such as the u-mutation that created Å. This article states that umlaut is specifically a type of i-mutation. In the North Germanic case, the recognition of both u-umlaut and i-umlaut, if not also a-umlaut, is fundamental due to the entanglement of the front u-umlauts and back i-umlauts, mergers most usually considered to have taken place before umlaut became distinctive. They are truly two halves of a whole. So it is important to uphold this inclusion of other types of umlaut, and not just to reflect common practice. ᛭ LokiClock ( talk) 18:50, 13 June 2010 (UTC)
I don't think it's out of the question to just retitle the Old Norse section "Umlaut in Old Norse" and open with a sentence about how, unlike in the other languages, Old Norse umlaut involves multiple mutations. Then any exclusive sentences can be adjusted without failing to communicate that it was most widely an i-mutation. ᛭ LokiClock ( talk) 06:48, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
This term is meaningless. A non-phonological sound change is an oxymoron. I'd assume phonemic is meant, but the Old Norse statement remains confusing or inaccurate. Even if it's meant that the one umlaut produces vowels purely by allophonic alternation, those vowels don't stop being phonemic. When one says that a sound change has become phonemic it means that the sounds before and after the process have become distinct, not that the sound change itself represents a system of alternation between phonemes and not between allophones. Ablaut, for example, is not a phonemic sound change because it was never an allophonic sound change.
The statement in question:
The situation in Old Norse is complicated as there are two forms of i-mutation. Of these two, only one is phonologized.
᛭ LokiClock ( talk) 03:20, 8 August 2010 (UTC)
This article begins as follows:
What is a "following vowel"? Michael Hardy ( talk) 16:41, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
Hey guys, dude from Antwerp/Belgium here, I saw some minor mistakes in the section on Dutch (which is also the majority language in Belgium) but since I don't feel secure enough to start editting it myself, I'll post here and see what you guys have to say about it or if y'all are proficient enough in English & wiki'ing to edit it yerselves.
"that long vowels and diphthongs were not affected by umlaut in the more western dialects, including those in Brabant and Holland that were most influential for standard Dutch." -> it is rather "Flanders and Holland" (and Zeeland). "Flanders" here in the historical meaning ( County of Flanders), now +- the provinces West Flanders and East Flanders. Not the current sense of Flanders, being the whole Dutch-speaking part of Belgium.
I wouldn't know how to shortly get that into the article lol.
Most Brabantian dialects *do* have extensive umlauting - especially on long ô, which is the example used in the article; only a small corner bordering to Holland (and under heavy linguistic influence from there) has forms without umlaut. (the old Markiezaat of Bergen op Zoom; see also Lords and margraves of Bergen op Zoom Except for this area (with smaller cities like Bergen op Zoom, Steenbergen, Roosendaal), Brabantian dialects have the form 'vulen' instead of 'voelen', pronounced /vy:lë/, or alternatively /vylə/ (North Brabant) or with vowel opening /vø:lə/ (Flemish Brabant).
This area includes all major (historical) Brabantian cities, like Antwerp, Brussels, Leuven, Breda (it's older, traditional dialect at least), Mechelen, Den Bosch, Eindhoven, Tilburg etc.
A dialect map of the word "green" (st. Dutch groen /grun/, Brabantian gruun /gry:n/ and var.) can be found here: http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/origineel.php?origineel=daan001atla01_01_scan0008
The dots indicate dialects without umlaut (=groen /grun/), the other symbols various results of umlaut like /gry:n/, /gryn/, /grø:n/, /grøyn/; and Frisian (horizontal rectangles): grien /gri.ən/
So while it's true that the umlaut-less forms of Standard Dutch are based on western forms, these are not the Brabantian ones (the big influence of Brab. dialects on the standard language is another myth, but that's for another time; Flemish dialects have had much bigger impact, as a.o. the lack of umlauts show)
(some examples from my native Antwerp dialect; with the exception of the North-West corner of North Brabant, these go for *all* of the Brabantian dialects, with /y:/ sometimes as /y/ (North) or /ø:/ (South):
long *â: cheese/kaas /kε:s/; shear/schaar /schε:r/; suffix -aar < Latin -ârius /εr/, /ε:r/
I could name many more; almsot all instances of long ô and many of â have umlaut where it's expected.
Uml. of the Gmc. diphthong */au/ is a bit rarer, and only exists in the eastern half of old Brabant. Some relics of umlauts in diminutives also exist mostly in this eastern half, but umlauts in strong verbs only remain in a few neighbouring villages with Limburg, where these are stll very common.
Cheers, Diederik, Antwerp.
PS the reason why I didn't want to edit this myself is, as you can see, that the way I explain it turns out very unnecessarily long and incoherent ;) — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
84.197.115.157 (
talk)
11:47, 10 June 2011 (UTC)
Shouldn't it be mentioned that the umlaut is two dots above the letter? Seems that there is no description in the introduction of how the umlaut is actually written. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.240.79.226 ( talk) 17:36, 5 February 2012 (UTC)
From the text it seems like "Loss of final '-z'" should result in *fōtiz -> *fōti and not *fōtiz -> *fēti.
Process | Language | Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Original form | Proto-Germanic | *mūs | *mūsiz | *fōts | *fōtiz |
Loss of final -z | West Germanic | *mūs | *mūsi | *fōt | *fōti |
jsnx ( talk) 14:29, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
It is unfortunate, that it is not recognized in the article that Turkish and other Turkic languages have also Umlauts. In Turkish language, they use ö and ü, in Turkmen language, there is also a ü. In Hungarian they us ő for the ö -- 49.147.189.182 ( talk) 05:00, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
Could we have a citation, please, for the claim that Umlaut in Germanic verbs is widely known as "False Ablaut", and that that is not just somebody's personal pet tag? Otherwise I intend to remove that information. -- Doric Loon ( talk) 20:40, 25 May 2014 (UTC)
I've been a speaker of Afrikaans all my life, and am also fluent in English and German. I have noticed that umlaut is absent in Afrikaans, after it descended from Dutch, except for maybe a few "leftovers," like "gedagte" (thought, noun). Am I correct, or does Afrikaans have it's own Umlaut of some sort? From what I've known, the answer is no. Do I stand corrected? Shalin1234 ( talk) 21:26, 3 November 2018 (UTC)
I am currently trying to explain to an English speaker how he should write my last name and just wanted to send him a link with an explanation. That's how I come up with following suggestion: I would love to have a section about the alternative writing of umlauts, ie. ue instead of ü. In particular, authorities always insist to write my name with an u instead of ü and ignore my explantation. It would be awesome if there would be a clear section (without scanning the whole article) about the alternative writing so I can pinpoint everyone who insist to write my name with an u. PS. I did not want to just add a section since I know how fast a contestation on Wikipedia is started. -- Zubi 00:51, 21 April 2019 (UTC)
The article states that "took place separately in various Germanic languages starting around 450 or 500 CE." This is almost certainly wrong, and neither of the two referenced articles for this sentence mention any dates at all. Perhaps it is a typo and BCE was meant.
I don't feel expert enough to assert a different date, but would appreciate someone with more background taking a look. Sean.pk.mcgrath ( talk) 11:56, 20 May 2024 (UTC)