As an undergrad, thanks to the fact that I could easily do diacritics with TeX, I was overfond of using the diaeresis (I had gleaned from observation, not just in the New Yorker but also the writings of Donald Knuth, that a diaeresis served to distinguish two vowels that were pronounced separately which might otherwise form a diphthong).
The thing that helped me limit this practice more than anything else was a comment from Nelson Beebe that whenever he saw coördinate in something I had written, he mentally pronounced it as if he were channelingÂč Peter Sellarsâs Inspector Clouseau.
âž»
1. The New Yorker style guide would call for this to be spelled âchannelling.â The diaeresis is not the only idiosyncrasy of that publicationâs style.
Another fun diacritic is the macron. The Mc in McCormick replaces Mac, and can use the COMBINING MACRON BELOW (â̱c). I couldn't get it working in ConTeXt, so wrote my own:
https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite-themes/-/blob/main/b...
When typing prose into my novel, if I use any of the words listed in the replacement text (McGenius, McNester, etc.), they get replaced with the C macron.
Ha, I get to do an ackshually!
> The umlaut symbol originated in German but has been borrowed into other languages, including Swedish
Actually, no. In Swedish, Ă is not an A with an umlaut, Ă is a distinct letter of the Swedish alphabet. Swedish has nine vowels: AOUĂ EIYĂĂ, unlike German, which has five vowels: AEIOU, and three umlauts: ĂĂĂ.
The evolution of it in Swedish comes from Ă -> AÍ€ -> Ă, while in neighbouring Denmark and Norway, they kept both Ă and Ă. All three languages also have Ă , which comes from AA.
Super-mega-pedantry edit:
Okay, the article says Swedish borrowed the umlaut symbol, and this is actually true. In the 1500's when printing presses were becoming common, Swedish printers imported them from Germany, the German ones didn't have Ă types, but they did have Ă types, and the Swedish printers essentially went "ah, fuck it, can't be arsed", and started using Ă and Ă.
...while the Danish printers also imported the presses from Germany, but said "fuck you, we're making our own types" and kept using Ă and Ă.
English isnât set by a standards body; itâs designed by all of our little choices. And I think English is enhanced by the noble diaeresis, and diminished without it, so I will continue to write reĂ«lect, reĂ«valuate, and coöperate.
And maybe perhaps the pronunciation of diaeresis would be clearer written diaëresis?
I was on board with the fanciness of this editorial stance for a while. But after I recently learned what diaereses are for I think, whatâs the point? You know how cooperate is pronounced. You know that being naive is not being a knave.
English spelling is bad enough overall but words like that donât even come up on my radar in that context.
You know what a really good editorial stance would be? Simplify the dang French words. How am I supposed to spell beurocracy? Why canât it just be âbyurocracyâ? Please lead the charge on this one NY.
> It mostly appears in French borrowings like naïveté
That's a very American English example. In Britain, you canât drive[1] far without seeing a CitroĂ«n.
[1] generic verb for "proceed along a road"; personally I do it on a bike
Big surge of The New Yorker subscriptions in Saxony, Germany
Or, you know, adopt phonetic alphabet like the Japanese and the Koreans. That may stop all the nonsense with arbitrary pronunciation (it wonât).
I enjoy the way that the New Yorker's style guide enforces consistency and precision in a way that is often lacking in English. Not just the diareses, but also the way they consistently follow the rule that when you add "ing" to a word that ends in a short vowel, you double the final consonant to make it clear that it is a short vowel. So the gerund of "bus" is "bussing", not the commonly used "busing", the latter of which looks like it ought to rhyme with "abusing".
It's just clear that someone thought deeply about a system that follows consistent rules. You don't often see that with writing these days.