# Ortography and umlaut



## dihydrogen monoxide

I have a question about ortography. German has ä,ö,ü. Swedish has the same sounds, but I'm interested why they don't utilize ü, but utilize the other two. The same question applies to Finnish.


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## Awwal12

German utilizes both "y" and "ü" for /y/. Swedish (and Finnish, which largely inherits its orthogrpagy) just finds having one more letter unnecessary.
On the other hand, all these languages couldn't do without "ö" (and digraphs are inconvenient). With "ä" the situation is more complex but generally the same.


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## Ben Jamin

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> I have a question about ortography. German has ä,ö,ü. Swedish has the same sounds, but I'm interested why they don't utilize ü, but utilize the other two. The same question applies to Finnish.


Finnish has the letter y to denote their Version of the /y/ sound, so it does not need the ü letter. 
By the way, the pronunciation of the letter ä in Swedish (/ɛː/) and Finnish ([æ]) is different. Moreover, the Finnish letters ä and ö have nothing to do with umlaut. Swedish has no sound like German ü either. The sounds represented by "u" and "y" in Swedish orthography differ from the German ü.


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## berndf

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> I have a question about ortography. German has ä,ö,ü. Swedish has the same sounds, but I'm interested why they don't utilize ü, but utilize the other two.


I would assume because Swedish has only two umlauts. The Swedish _u_-umlaut is phonemically merged into the _o_-umlaut:
_fot-fötter
mus-möss_


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## Ben Jamin

Isn't this necessary to distinguish between the phonetic phenomenon of umlaut and the graphic representation of the letters with two dots over? I think dihydrogene meant the latter. As I wrote in my previous post, Finnish ä and ö are not a result of umlaut.


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## Awwal12

Ben Jamin said:


> Isn't this necessary to distinguish between the phonetic phenomenon of umlaut and the graphic representation of the letters with two dots over? I think dihydrogene meant the latter. As I wrote in my previous post, Finnish ä and ö are not a result of umlaut.


Finnish /ö/ and /y/ are in the same phonetic relation to /o/ and /u/ as German /ö/ and /y/, though, - they are their frontal counterpairs, regardless of their origin.


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## fdb

Awwal12 said:


> German utilizes both "y" and "ü" for /y/.



But <y> only in a small number of loan words from Greek.


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## berndf

Ben Jamin said:


> Isn't this necessary to distinguish between the phonetic phenomenon of umlaut and the graphic representation of the letters with two dots over? I think dihydrogene meant the latter.


It is about the _morphological _and not the _phonological _phenomenon. Independently of how umlauts historically evolved, they are belong to active inflection patterns and that is why a transparent graphical relation of umlauts to their respective base vowels is important. If Swedish functioned like German then Swedish would probably have an _ü_, even though it is phonetically indistinguishable from _ö_, just to keep the morphology straight. E.g. in the 18th/19th century German changed _Lenge _to _Länge _and in 1996 they changed _Quentchen _to _Quäntchen _for no other reason then make the respective relations to the underlying words _lang_ and Quant(um) more transparent, although a short _e_ and a short _ä_ are completely indistinguishable.

I guess the whole thing is of lesser importance in Nordic languages then in German because German underwent a second wave of umlauting in the middle ages and umlauting appears in many more morphological patterns than in Swedish.


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## Ben Jamin

berndf said:


> The graphical form of the letter does have something to do with its morphological function.
> 
> It is about the _morphological _and not the _phonological _phenomenon. Independently of how umlauts historically evolved, they are belong to active inflection patterns and that is why a transparent graphical relation of umlauts to their respective base vowels is important. If Swedish functioned like German then Swedish would probably have an _ü_, even though it is phonetically indistinguishable from _ö_, just to keep the morphology straight. E.g. in the 18th/19th century German changed _Lenge _to _Länge _and in 1996 they changed _Quentchen _to _Quäntchen _for no other reason then make the respective relations to the underlying words _lang_ and Quant(um) more transparent, although a short _e_ and a short _ä_ are completely indistinguishable.
> 
> I guess the whole thing is of lesser importance in Nordic languages then in German because German underwent a second wave of umlauting in the middle ages and umlauting appears in many more morphological patterns than in Swedish.


I understand this explanation, but it can't be extended to Finnish, as the letters ä and ö are not a result of umlaut as far as I know.


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## berndf

Ben Jamin said:


> but it can't be extended to Finnish


Finish took its spelling convention from Swedish (for obvious reasons). I don't think Finnish matters for this question.


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## Määränpää

berndf said:


> I would assume because Swedish has only two umlauts. The Swedish _u_-umlaut is phonemically merged into the _o_-umlaut:
> _fot-fötter
> mus-möss_


What about comparative adjectives?
_ung-yngre
tung-tyngre_


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## berndf

Määränpää said:


> What about comparative adjectives?
> _ung-yngre
> tung-tyngre_


So there is no merger with the short o- and u-umlauts?


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## Ben Jamin

berndf said:


> Finish took its spelling convention from Swedish (for obvious reasons). I don't think Finnish matters for this question.


Well, dihydrogen made an assumption that Finnish also has umlaut, that's why I commented on it.


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## Ben Jamin

Awwal12 said:


> Finnish /ö/ and /y/ are in the same phonetic relation to /o/ and /u/ as German /ö/ and /y/, though, - they are their frontal counterpairs, regardless of their origin.


Yes, but is this "umlaut"?


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## Awwal12

Ben Jamin said:


> Yes, but is this "umlaut"?


Actually, considering that Finnish largely expresses vowel harmony and therefore affixes containing /a/, /o/ and /u/ normally get /ä/, /ö/ and /y/ when the stem ending contains a frontal vowel - I'd say yes, it's umlaut.


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## Ben Jamin

Awwal12 said:


> Actually, considering that Finnish largely expresses vowel harmony and therefore affixes containing /a/, /o/ and /u/ normally get /ä/, /ö/ and /y/ when the stem ending contains a frontal vowel - I'd say yes, it's umlaut.


I thought that the term umlaut was reserved for the phonetical process that indicate a change in grammatical information. This could only partially be applied to the Finnish Language as the vowel harmony only functions this way when adding grammatical suffixes to root words.
The dotted vowels inside the Finnish Words, however, don't indicate any grammatical change, neither in the root Word or the suffix, unlike in the Germanic Words. It's just a pure phonetic adjusting. By the way, in the Scandinavian languages the vowel quality often changes  diachronically without any grammatical reason.


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## Awwal12

Ben Jamin said:


> I thought that the term umlaut was reserved for the phonetical process that indicate a change in grammatical information.


Hardly. Basically it's just a certain kind of alterations inside a morpheme. In the very German it may happen not only during declension or conjugation, but also during word formation (e.g. das Horn vs. das Hörnchen).


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## berndf

Awwal12 said:


> Hardly. Basically it's just a certain kind of alterations inside a morpheme. In the very German it may happen not only during declension or conjugation, but also during word formation (e.g. das Horn vs. das Hörnchen).


I agree with Ben Jamin on this. Umlauting modifies stem-vowels, not affix vowels. Those are different processes.


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## MattiasNYC

Regarding the Swedish language we had a discussion on this topic both in the "Nordic" section as well as via PM. I wrote in a PM the following, which I think is relevant:

I looked at the Wikipedia entries for Swedish, French and German:

Swedish alphabet - Wikipedia
French orthography - Wikipedia
German orthography - Wikipedia

It's fairly interesting actually. According to the articles Swedish definitely has å, ä, ö as separate letters, and the "signs" above the respective "a, a, o" are _not_ viewed as being added accents or umlauts.

In French by contrast they are specified as being accents (diacritic).

And finally in German the umlaut change the sound but isn't part of the actual alphabet.


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## berndf

MattiasNYC said:


> And finally in German the umlaut change the sound but isn't part of the actual alphabet.


ä, ö, ü and ß are definitely separate letters of the German alphabet. But they all have replacement digraphs (from which they had originally been derived) which has produced several rivaling traditions how to alphabetize words containing these letters. But this doesn't mean they aren't proper letters. Phonologically, ä, ö, ü represent 6 different phonemes, 5 of which are only represented by these letters.


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## MattiasNYC

So do you disagree with: "Although the diacritic letters represent distinct sounds in German phonology, they are almost universally not considered to be part of the alphabet. Almost all German speakers consider the alphabet to have the 26 cardinal letters above and will name only those when asked to say the alphabet"?


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## Määränpää

berndf said:


> Määränpää said:
> 
> 
> 
> What about comparative adjectives?
> _ung-yngre
> tung-tyngre_
> 
> 
> 
> So there is no merger with the short o- and u-umlauts?
Click to expand...

I don't know, those were the only words I remembered. (Maybe also derivation: _ut-yta_?)

But maybe if 99,9% of the Swedish words containing the [y] sound are not "umlaut" versions of existing "U words", it wouldn't seem rational to use ü. (In German the grammatical umlaut phenomenon is more common.)


berndf said:


> Finish took its spelling convention from Swedish (for obvious reasons). I don't think Finnish matters for this question.


I imagine Estonian took ü from German for the same obvious (colonial) reasons. Turkish must have been inspired by German as well, even though the Turks had their own empire.


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## berndf

MattiasNYC said:


> and will name only those when asked to say the alphabet"


Depends on if you ask them to spell the _Latin_ or the _German_ alphabet. They are conceptually distinguished and used in different contexts.


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## Ben Jamin

MattiasNYC said:


> It's fairly interesting actually. According to the articles Swedish definitely has å, ä, ö as separate letters, and the "signs" above the respective "a, a, o" are _not_ viewed as being added accents or umlauts.
> 
> In French by contrast they are specified as being accents (diacritic).
> 
> And finally in German the umlaut change the sound but isn't part of the actual alphabet.


I don't understand your problem. The mentioned letters are "letters with diacritics" and "separate letters" at the same time. It is just a question of convention of listing words in dictionaries. The French have a Convention of calling all diacritics "accents", even those that have nothing to do with the original meaning of the word "accent". In other countries "accent"= "stress" and/or "prosody". No Swede would call the little circle above the "a" an "accent".


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## MattiasNYC

Ben, I don't have a problem.

I'm agreeing with you. I just wanted to include what I referenced because the information in those Wikipedia articles seemed relevant (and support what you said).


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