Diaeresis

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Diaeresis

In linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the science study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of Meaning ....
, diaeresis, or dieresis, is the pronunciation of two adjacent vowel

Vowel

In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis....
s in two separate syllable

Syllable

A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of Speech communication sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter....
s rather than as a diphthong

Diphthong

In phonetics, a diphthong, or , is a contour vowel?that is, a unitary vowel that changes vowel quality during its pronunciation, or "glides", with a glissando of the tongue from one articulation to another, as in the English words eye, boy, and cow. This contrasts with "pure" vowels, or monophthongs, where the tongue is held s...
, and it is also the name of the diacritic mark ( ¨ ) used to prompt the reader to pronounce adjacent vowels in this manner.

The word diaeresis comes from the Greek

Greek language

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In linguistics

Linguistics

Vowel

Syllable

A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of Speech communication sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter....
s rather than as a diphthong

Diphthong

Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
noun d?a??es?? (diaíresis, "division," or literally, "choice between"), which derives from the verb (diaireîn). An example is the first two vowels in the word cooperate. This word might also be spelled co-operate or, using the diaeresis, coöperate.

The opposite phenomenon is known as synaeresis
Synaeresis

In linguistics, synaeresis is the contraction of two vowels into a diphthong . If synaeresis is used against convention, it may serve as a rhetorical figure ....
.

Orthography

The diaeresis is a diacritic mark ( ¨ ) used in English to indicate that two adjacent vowels are to be pronounced separately as in Noël and naïve, the names Zoë and Chloë and words like reënter and coöperate. Despite its long history in English, the diaeresis is decreasingly common in modern usage, though The New Yorker magazine

The New Yorker

The New Yorker is an United States magazine that publishes reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Starting as a weekly in the mid-1920s, the magazine is now published 47 times per year, with five of these issues covering two-week spans....
is a prominent exception. Dutch

Dutch language

Dutch is a West Germanic languages spoken by over 22 million people as a first language, and about 5 million people as a second language."1% of the EU population claims to speak Dutch well enough in order to have a conversation." Outside the European Union the number of second language speakers of Dutch is very small. Most native...
uses the same mark in a similar way, (for example coëfficiënt), but as with English there is now a preference for hyphenation - so zeeëend (seaduck) is now spelled zee-eend.

Other languages indicate phonological diaeresis with different diacritics, such as the acute accent

Acute accent

The acute accent is a diacritic mark used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin alphabet, Cyrillic alphabet and Greek alphabet writing systems....
in Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish or Castilian is a Romance languages that originated in northern Spain, and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile and evolved into the principal language of government and trade....
and Portuguese

Portuguese language

Portuguese is a Romance language that originated in what is now Galicia and Portugal. It is derived from the Latin language spoken by the Romanization Pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula around 2000 years ago....
. For example, the Portuguese words saia "skirt" and saía "I used to leave" (Brazilian pronunciation

Brazilian Portuguese

Brazilian Portuguese is a group of Portuguese dialects written and spoken by virtually all the 189 million inhabitants of Brazil and by a few million Brazilian emigrants, mainly in the United States, United Kingdom, Portugal, Canada, Japan and Paraguay....
) differ in that the sequence forms a diphthong in the former (synaeresis), but is a hiatus in the latter (diaeresis).

The diaeresis diacritic mark is unrelated to the often identical-looking umlaut

Umlaut (diacritic)

The word umlaut is the name of a type of sound shift in spoken language and of the diacritic mark used to represent it Orthography. The diacritic mark comprises a pair of dots or lines placed over the letter that represents the affected Vowel....
in German, and the decorative "heavy metal umlaut

Heavy metal umlaut

A metal umlaut is an umlaut that is sometimes used gratuitously or decoratively over letters in the names of heavy metal music bands, such as in M?tley Cr?e or Mot?rhead....
" of bands such as Blue Öyster Cult

Blue Öyster Cult

Blue ?yster Cult is an American rock music band formed in New York in 1967 and still active in 2009. The group is especially well known for songs including " The Reaper", "Godzilla", and "Burnin' for You"....
.

Diaeresis

Orthography

See also