• tromars@feddit.org
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        3 days ago

        That’s how umlauts historically evolved, but nowadays I wouldn‘t say ü short for ue, but its own letter (even though you still can write it as ue if you don’t have it available on your keyboard or whatever)

        • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
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          2 days ago

          Well, my point is that it’s not considered a u, and Austrian and Swiss don’t use it.

          Also, fun fact, some romance languages like French and Brazilian Portuguese have an identical diacritic to umlaut but it’s different. It’s meant to mean the vowel is separate (like in the word naïve)

          • furry toaster@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            2 days ago

            in Brazillian portuguese it had a completely different meaning, and it was used for disambiguation of the pronounciation of some words, in short “gue” in portuguese can make a ghe (gh as in ghost) or a gue (gu as in guatemala), a similiar thing happens with “que”, this umlaug looklike was meant to make clear that the “u” was to be pronounced, so we had spellings like “freqüencia”

            • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
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              2 days ago

              That’s exactly the other meaning I described. In Portuguese it was/is used to separate the vowels so they are not pronounced together.

          • fibojoly@sh.itjust.works
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            2 days ago

            We call it tréma. Aka diaeresis. It explicitly tells you to pronounce two vowels near each other separately.
            A typical use is to indicate a normally silent vowel must be read out. For example “maïs” (MA-EE-S’) is completely different from “mais” (MAY).