diaeresis

A diacritical Signum of separating habit. When applied to the second of two adjacent vowels, it refuses their merger into a single syllable: coöperate, naïve, reëlect. The organism does not change what either vowel is; it insists only that they decline to combine. It is among the smallest of the Signum, and the most easily mistaken for an organism whose habits are entirely different — see Easily Confused With.

The diaeresis is a separator that has, through overwhelming territorial loss, become known mostly by its absence.

Critically Endangered. Survives in fragmented habitat, principally one weekly periodical in the United States and a small number of personal names actively defended by their bearers. The cause of decline is mechanical — Linotype cost, then keyboard convenience, then autocorrect — and not semantic. The need it served has not gone away; the readers have adapted by re-reading, which the Society regards as a less elegant solution.

Breeds reliably in three habitats: (1) the house style of one American weekly, where it is bred in captivity and where its observers may be counted; (2) the loanword preserves — naïve, Noël, aiguë — where it persists as a holdover from French manners; (3) the diaereses of certain proper names, where it survives by being part of the deed. Strays appear in linguistics textbooks and opera programs. Conspicuously absent from text-message corpora and search-engine queries, where it is stripped on entry by mechanisms that do not announce themselves.

Silent — Signum are mute by definition. Its prosodic effect, however, is audible in the host word: a hairline syllable boundary inserted where most contemporary readers produce a glide. The boundary is brief and entirely deniable. A reader who pronounces it has been trained to; a reader who does not has not been told.

The diaeresis-host is recognized by three marks: (1) two points presented over the second vowel of a pair, never the first; (2) the absence of the more aggressive cousins (acute, grave, circumflex), with which the diaeresis declines to share a host; (3) a faint sense, in the surrounding paragraph, of a publication that has paid for a proofreader. The diaeresis travels with capital expenditure and a certain managerial restraint.

The umlaut. This is the field mark that matters. The two organisms are visually indistinguishable and functionally unrelated — a case of convergent typography, the marsupial wolf and the placental wolf wearing identical pelts for different reasons. The umlaut transforms a vowel into a different vowel (German a → ä is not a slowed a but a wholly other sound). The diaeresis transforms nothing; it merely refuses a merger. The umlaut acts; the diaeresis abstains.

In the field: if the host word is German, suspect umlaut. If the host word is English and the dots stand over the second of a pair, suspect diaeresis. If the host word is Brontë, the Society has fought over it for a century and a half and recommends moving on.

A subtler confusion is with the hyphen in co-operate, which is not a sibling organism but a competitor. The hyphen colonised the diaeresis’s niche during the twentieth century and was subsequently displaced from it by the closed compound (cooperate), leaving the niche unoccupied. The diaeresis has not returned to fill it; the readers, as noted, re-read instead.

The mark predates its English career. Greek grammarians used it to indicate vowel separation in scansion; Latin epigraphers borrowed it; French typesetters domesticated it. It entered English via loanword and was, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, briefly common in serious American prose. Linotype made it expensive. Hyphenation took its work, and then the closed compound took the hyphen’s, leaving the diaeresis with no employer and a reputation for fastidiousness. Its principal remaining patron is noted under Status.