I actually like it, it's a great idea. You wouldn't be surprised if you saw words like Köln or Malmö (or even Malmø) in an English text, right, so how is this different?
In your other examples, all the sounds would be considered "o-like" (rather than "e-like") in most languages with a 5-vowel phonology or similar. A reader might not be able to parse the diaresis, but if they say it with a plain "o", it's a reasonable approximation.
But then "ё" in "Пётр" is really just [ʲo] phonetically, so it should, ideally, be reflected by "o" or some derivative glyph in transliteration for readers to be able to understand and pronounce it with any semblance of accuracy. Something like "Pötr" would probably be best, actually, since in most alphabets that have "ö", it's used for [ø] or similar, which would give a more accurate approximation of [ʲo] than just [o].
OTOH the Latin "ë" (when present in the alphabet, which is much rarer to begin with) tends to stand for [ə], so it would be most logical to use it to distinguish "э" from "е". Note that this can be treated as a consistent pattern: a diaresis over the vowel inverts its "default" frontness (front vowels become back, back vowels become front) to simulate the corresponding presence or absence of [ʲ]. Thus we can then also write "ä" for "я", "ü" for "ю", and "ï" for "ы".
You've correctly defined diaeresis, but it's not actually used in English except in articles that get published in The New Yorker. There is a reason the common English name for the diacritic is "umlaut".
The normal use in English is to show that a word comes from German. There are some old relics like naïve (commonly spelled naive, now) and Laocoön (again, now usually spelled Laocoon). To the best of my knowledge a diaeresis has never been applied to the name "Menelaus" even though it "needs" one just as badly as Laocoon does.
> Naïve is one example, where it is pronounced na-ive, not nive.
The diaeresis there really just shows you that the word is borrowed from French, where it has a diaeresis for internal French reasons. (Because, again, English spelling does not include the concept of diaeresis.) It certainly doesn't tell you not to pronounce the word as "nive" (I assume you're referring to the PRICE vowel) -- the ordinary reading of the written vowel sequence "ai" would use the FACE vowel, as in plain, main, strain, vain, tail, wail, pail, sail, mail, plaice, taint, and waive.
Note that the Russian letter Ё does not feature a diacritic - the two dots are an integral part of the letter, and it is not related to the visually similar Russian letter E. As noted upthread, it is the iotified form of the letter O. (Russian has five or six non-reduced vowels, but for historical reasons the Russian alphabet has eleven vowels, including a / e / i / o / u plus ya / ye / y / yo / yu.)
Well, it is very much related to it historically, but it's beyond the point. Just nitpicking, sorry
> Sorry mate, but an umlaut does not represent the same thing as a diaeresis!
You're going to need to decide what you're talking about. The diacritic of two dots positioned above a letter is most often called "umlaut" in English. It is not normally called "diaeresis", but sometimes it is.
There is a phonological phenomenon also called "umlaut", which is related to the name for the mark in that the mark was historically used in German to indicate the phenomenon. The relationship is dead now; German ö is just a different letter from German o.
Don't get confused between https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umlaut_(linguistics) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umlaut_(diacritic) .
I can't think of any such examples similar to "naïve". Stuff like "ü" shows up in German names - and that's because the modern English convention is to not transliterate names that are already spelled in some kind of Latin script, even if it means dealing with weird digraphs, diacritics, or letters like ð. This doesn't work for Cyrillic, though.
For cyrillic a fixed transliteration is both more needed. "o" and "ö" sound different, but even if you pronounced any "ö" as "o" everybody would understand what you meant. This is different for cyrillic where there are many letters where typical western readers wouldn't even know how to pronounce them. A "Щ" would look like a weird "W", but is romanized as "shch" or "sch".
Even more extreme examples would be the romanization of japanese.
If you’re going to use Ë just because it looks the same as the original Cyrillic, then logically you’d also use P instead of R, X instead of Kh, etc.
Много городов у вас в России))
This is wrong on so many levels...