The Diacritics That Look the Same, But Aren't

A topic I'm personally interested in. I don't know what you'll think about it, but here you go. ü and ü are different: go figure.
Sorry for the long break since the last video; I got distracted :)

You've convinced me to change the title from "accent" to "diacritic", well done.

Thanks to my patrons!!

Written and Created by Me
Art by kvd102
Music also hastily put together by me

0:00 - Intro
0:57 - Umlaut and Trema
4:12 - Credits

Translations:
Leeuwe van den Heuvel - Dutch
Alex375 - German
vlrfsg - Japanese
Constantin Iosub - Romanian
Carlo Paternoster - Italian
Hugínnn - Danish
YOAV - Hebrew
Rubýñ - Spanish
Diriector_Doc - French
Elliot Chen - Standard Mandarin

[anderji]

Ah nothing like Spanish pengüínos. Picky comment of the day... it's pingüino :P

[thomasrdiehl]

"There are no lauts being ummed" - I did not know my German is an organ that can be in pain.

[ABitSoupy]

0:15 'though its usually kind of optional' As someone who's last name is Noël, typing and 'simplicity' has basically forced it to be optional, but if I'm writing it out, I always add the accents.

[Garbaz]

0:20 Native speaker of German, and I've always considered ä/ö/ü simply as separate letters. I had no idea that there is some systematic connection in the phonetics to a/o/u. Quite interesting.
Also, writing umlauts like ae/oe/ue still is done in some circumstances, like in crosswords or in ASCII encoded filenames/URLs/etc, so the origin of the dots as an e still lives on in some capacity.

[白空-kq]

Did I already know all of this as a German who learned French? Yes. Did I absolutely want to watch the video anyway and found it interesting? Also yes. I just like your style of explaining things, and usually I can still learn something new - so thank you!

[jasper]

A few weeks ago, I explained the right way to write a Dutch word to a German colleague. He exclaimed "with an umlaut!?" and I responded with "no, that's a trema, which is a competely different thing". I didn't know just how right I was though.

(To be fair, I was able to explain how the trema breaks up digraphs, and I did have a vague idea about the umlaut having been stripes rather than dots until the advent of the printing press, but I didn't really know these wildly different origins)

[DifficultGreek]

In Modern Greek, this diacritic ¨ isn't called diaeresis (literally: "division, separation") nor trema (literally: "opening, hole"). It's called διαλυτικά /ðialitiˈka/, which is a nominalised adjective (in the plural, since it's a pair or dots), meaning "dissolvent", and displays the same morphosemantic pattern as its English definition. Colour thinners and correction-fluid thinners are called the same.

[roggeralves]

Brazilian Portuguese used to have the diaeresis (like in Spanish) but it was abolished in the newest spelling reform.
"Penguin" used to be "pingüim" but now it's "pinguim". Now there is no way to know if the 'u' should be pronounced or not (if you're a foreigner learning Portuguese, for example). I liked it with the diaeresis better...

[azarias]

The best exemple in french of that (3:02) is the word "gageure". Most people not knowing the right pronuciation (even french speaker) says it like "gagEUre" with "eu" making /œ/ but in reality it's just "ga-ge-Ure" with the e just making the g become /ʒ/. But now thank to the reform of 1990 it can be spelled "gageüre"

[harczymarczy]

In Hungarian, ö and ü have always been considered as separate letters. They actually came directly from German. More to say, they also have their long forms ő and ű which are unique Hungarian letters. Since there is a correlation of length in Hungarian the long and short vowels are considered as different letters for different sounds. ä is not present in Hungarian as a letter but as a sound in certain dialects like West Transdanubian. On some occasions, West Transdanubian Hungarians use three different sounds for e: ä, e and ë (the latter being a closed e tending towards French é but it is always short).
The two-point glyph on the French ü etc. is also called a tréma. It is mostly used as ë but never as ä in French. In Finnish it's more like an umlaut but y is used instead of ü because these letters of Finnish actually came from Swedish. In Estonian, however, ü is preserved as a German heritage. Finnish-like duplication is used to write long Estonian wovels, too: aa, ää, ee, ii etc. Correlation of length in Estonian is even more complicated because according to some Estonian phoneticians, five(!) degrees of length should be distinguished. There are at least three of them for sure but in written Estonian, only two are marked: n vs. nn (for consonants too).

[ocelots]

I was watching an old tom scott video earlier today where he called a diaeresis an umlaut in the name Chloë and I had this exact thought. Funny timing for me, btw thanks for always making great videos

[thalesvondasos]

The e above vowels didn't really _turn into_ double strokes, that's just what e looked like in certain German scripts.

[alexanderlori]

Of course the German Schrift of writing the e back then just really looked like two vertical lines (which to this day are a popular way of handwriting your Umlautpunkte for them to be more visible), so it makes soo much sense that it evolved that way :o
Amazing video as always man :3

[nikolaimeshcherin]

0:18 we’ve got that in Russian, like in the word ёлка [yolka] (meaning christmas tree)
It changes the vowel sound from [ye] (Е) to [yo] (Ё)
The “Ё” formerly was just a version of “Е” but then it became a distinct letter (despite in most texts they dont write Ё, always Е, like ёлка => елка, мёд => мед, etc.)
There’s a musical band called Ё btw

[erentoraman]

The trema is also used in Dutch words, like geëist or kopiëren, though there are loanwords like föhn and überhaupt where the two dots do act like an umlaut

[deidara_]

The English language could really benefit from some diacritics, with the countless ways of pronouncing each letter. The verb "read" is spelled the same for both present and past tense, yet is pronounced differently, it would be nice to have a logical system where one can instantly tell how a word is pronounced just by seeing how it's spelled.

[Kadimak]

"there are no lauts to be um''ed." Honestly, that was one of the best remarks in YouTube history <3

[ManicEightBall]

Actually, in Unicode, you can represent ü with the single composed character with (U+00FC), or decomposed as: u (U+0075) followed by ◌̈ (U+0308)

[julleri]

0:18 Correct, as a Finnish person, we don't consider Ä and Ö as A and O with something on top. They simply are their own letters. At least that's how I have always viewed them.
Although I understand it is easy to view it that way especially for foreigners, beacause in many word endings you choose A or Ä depending on the word you are conjugating, and just apply it to an ending.
But again, this is something native Finnish speakers don't even realize doing😂

[WILLY]

In the brazilian portuguese (Portugal removed it in 1945) until 2015 it used to have the trema (aka=ü) in syllables like "güe", "güi", "qüe" and "qüi" to tell when we should pronunciate the "u" in some words, but after the 90s New Ortographic Agreement they just said "screw it, I'm too lazy to press shift+6 in my keyboard" and removed it, even though the sound stayed the same. Honestly, I liked the trema and I think the change is stupid, it makes no sence to remove it if the sound is still the same in the words which used it.
Here are some exemples: Words like "linguiça" and "bilíngue" have a pronunciated /u/ and used to be written with an "ü". And in words like "quem" and "aquele" the syllable "que" is pronunciate as /ke/, while the letter "u" is silent.