andersa@kuling.UUCP (Anders Andersson) (02/11/86)
In article <133@dg_rtp.UUCP> goudreau@dg_rtp.UUCP (Bob Goudreau) writes: >>Since when has French used umlaute? > >For quite a long time. For example, "Citro\:en", "Saint-Sa\:ens", "No\:el", >where "\:e" stands for umlaut-e. This started with somebody saying that French written language has use for "umlaut-y"; whether this is true or not I don't know, as I don't speak French. However, the term "umlaut" is a bit inappropriate. "Umlaut" is a German word meaning "re-sounding", and is in German used with the vowels a, o and u. Often umlaut is employed when the form of a word changes. Plural of "Buch" is "B\:ucher". Due to strong German influence during medieval time these accented vowels have been adopted by the Swedish language, but they are considered letters of their own, and are never referred to as "umlauts" here. The double-dot accent in French has a completely different meaning, and is called "trema", I think. It is used to separate two consecutive vowels in their pronounciation, making them not sound like a diphtong. Anyway, I suppose there is no visual difference between the "umlaut" and "trema" accents, so in standard text-processing equipment they might probably be considered the same, but what about in a voice synthesizer application? -- Anders Andersson, Dept. of Computer Systems, Uppsala University, Sweden Phone: +46 18 183170 UUCP: andersa@kuling.UUCP (...!{seismo,mcvax}!enea!kuling!andersa)