Diaeresis
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- This article is about the phonological term. For typographic issues of the diacritic ¨, see diaeresis (diacritic).
In linguistics, a diaeresis, or dieresis (AE) (from Greek Template:Polytonic (diairein), to divide) is the division of two adjacent vowels as two syllables rather than as a diphthong. The opposite phenomenon is known as synaeresis.
The diacritic mark composed of two small dots ( ¨ ) placed over a vowel to indicate this modification is also called a diaeresis, or a trema. In the case of an "i", it replaces the original dot.
Orthography
Template:Main In various languages, especially in Romance languages, the diaeresis mark indicates that a vowel which would normally be pronounced together with the letter that precedes it should be read separately.
In French, Greek and Dutch the diaeresis is placed on the second of two consecutive vowels to indicate that it is to be pronounced on its own, not left silent or merged into a diphthong, as in the words coöperate and Anaïs. Welsh also uses the diacritic for this purpose, with the diaeresis usually indicating the stressed vowel. French also uses the diaeresis to indicate syllabification in, for example, Gaëlle and païen. It is called trema or deelteken in Dutch, tréma in French.
The diaeresis has also occasionally been used in native English words for the above purposes (as in coöperate, reënact, naïve, and noöne), but this usage has become extremely rare since the 1940s. The New Yorker, The Economist and MIT's Technology Review can be noted as some of the few publications that spell coöperate with a diaeresis. Its use in English today, apart from words borrowed from other languages, is mostly limited to certain names, such as the surname Brontë and the given names Chloë & Zoë.
In Spanish, it is used over the vowel u to indicate that it is pronounced in places where that vowel would normally be silent. In particular, the u is silent in the letter combinations gue and gui, but in words such as vergüenza ("shame") or pingüino ("penguin"), the u is pronounced, forming a diphthong with the following vowel ([we] and [wi] respectively). For instance, in Spanish, ge is pronounced /xe/, gue is pronounced /ge/ and güe is pronounced /gwe/.
In Catalan, diaereses serve two different purposes. Similarly to Spanish, they are used in the groups güe, güi, qüe, and qüi to indicate that the u is in fact pronounced forming a diphthong with the following vowel ([we] and [wi] respectively). For example, aigües ("waters"), qüestió ("matter"). Also, similarly to French, diaereses are used over i or u to indicate that they do not form a diphthong with a preceding vowel. For example, veïna [b@'in@] ("neighbour", feminine), diürn [di'urn] ("diurnal").
Brazilian Portuguese uses the diaeresis like Spanish and also with letter combinations que and qui, in words such as cinqüenta ("fifty") and qüinqüênio ("a five-year period"). The diaeresis is no longer used in the other varieties of Portuguese. There is some discussion about removing the diaeresis from Brazilian Portuguese and it is not uncommon to omit them (either intentionally or not) in newspapers and informal writing.
A mixing of uses and letters can be standard for Galician: diaereses is used to mark the pronunciation of u after g (but not after q as Brazilian or Catalan) and also for hiatus (no diphthong) in some words (mainly inflected forms of verbs). So, a word can be distinguished by the use (or not) of diaereses. Examples includes saiamos (subjunctive present) and saïamos (imperfect present), and other forms of verbs with infinitives that end on -oir (oír, "to listen"), -aer (caer, "to fall"), -oer (moer, "mill"), -air (saír, "to go out"), and so on.
Ÿ can be used in transcribed Greek: there it represents the non-diphthong αυ (alpha upsilon), e.g. in the Persian name Artaÿctes at the very end of Herodotus.