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Comment by unwind | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit saddened by this news, since making their products flimsier/lighter will surely make them feel worse.

Anyway, the very first paragraph has this:

ÄLMHULT, Sweden—Amid IKEA’s colorful staged living rooms, piles of umlaut-laden housewares and endless rows of flat-pack boxes is furniture that can have shoppers wondering: How does that chair cost only $35?

Which I think is really bad writing for a publication like the WSJ. Swedish does not have "umlauts". We have three letters more than the US English alphabet, but only two of them (Ä and Ö) have the double dots: the third has a ring (Å). These three are real first-class letters though, they are not "umlauted" (which means changed from some base letter due to grammar).

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The dots are indeed called umlauts, at least in English:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umlaut_(diacritic)

I think OP's contention was that in Swedish these are not diacritical marks, but different letters.

Indeed. The equivalent Norwegian letters are æ/Æ, ø/Ø, å/Å (in the correct order). And you wouldn't call those umlauts either.

I think the OP is splitting hairs. I'd say that they are just as much different letters in German, from which the word "Umlaut" comes. One is replaced with the other in word inflections. For instance, the noun "Land" is "Länder" in plural — both in German and Swedish.

But what the two dots are not: they are definitely not diaeresis.

no, it is not splitting hairs.

You don't think of "y" being "u" with an Umlaut. For you this is a completely seperate letter. Ditto with ÄÖÅ im Swedish and ÆØÅ in Danish (Æ is never thought of as combined A and E).

> I'd say that they are just as much different letters in German

No. The German alphabet contains 26 letters, A-Z, plus 4 special letters, ÄÖÜẞ.

The Swedish alphabet contains 29 letters, A-ZÅÄÖ.

I'm not sure if that's a distinction or a difference. "Ñ" is a completely different letter than "N", but that doesn't make "~" less of a tilde.

The dots when used in English are called a diaeresis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)

Otherwise, except when discussing German, I think "two dots" is much more common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_dots_(diacritic)

That depends.

In English, ¨ is a diacritic mark called diaeresis, which indicates that a vowel is distinct, and shouldn't be diphthongized or dropped: Coöperation, Noël, Brontë.

In German, ¨ is a diacritic mark called umlaut, which transforms the vowels A, O, and U into their umlauted versions: Ä, Ö, and Ü. These characters are not distinct letters of the German alphabet, but belong to a special weird in-between class.

In Swedish, ¨ is not a diacritic mark, does not have a name, and is simply an integral part of the letters Ä and Ö, which together with Å are distinct letters of the Swedish alphabet. The dots aren't modifiers, they're not optional, Ä is not sort-of-an-A, it's as distinct from A as any other vowel, and its pronunciation is closer to E than A.

That's pretty funny - makes me think it's less diaeresis (thanks! TIL) and more akin to the dot over a lower case i or j: A letter with distinct sounds that can't be written without the marking above it.

Yes, that's actually a great example! The dot over i doesn't have a name and isn't a diacritic mark any longer, it's an integral part of the letter. It probably originated as a diacritic mark, though.

Ä in Swedish originated as the AE ligature where the E moved upwards and above the A until it became stylized as two dots. In Danish and Norwegian, they instead promoted Æ to a distinct letter.

Wikipedia does a great job for example for Ü, distinguishing between U-umlaut, U-diaeresis, and letter-Ü: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9C

> The dot over i doesn't have a name

Well you've just nerd-sniped me. I can't resist adding this bit of hyper-specific knowledge: it is called a tittle.

I had a german teacher insist we write umlauts as two little dashes instead of dots, because "they're not trémas" (French for diaeresis) which are written as two little dots. The wikipedia article above seems to say they're the same. Was I lied to all these years ?

To me, in Swedish, Ā and Ä and an A with two small dashes above would be the same letter, but with stylistic typeface differences. It doesn't change the letter itself. I have never heard of any German insisting their umlauts shouldn't be dots, so I think your German teacher was just a bit pedantic/insane.

Conceptually umlaut dots are different from trema dots, but who cares?

Only in languages where they are umlauts. Look at, for example, Ä and Umlaut-A: they have historically been written differently. They were simplified to mean the same thing in handwriting a long time ago, but as recently as in iso-8859-1 they made a conscious decision to merge them.

Unicode also makes a difference, but generally recommends the merged character.

To non-linguist English speakers, languages with the same letters as the English alphabet plus a few more with two dots on top, are just referred to as English-letter-name with-umlaut.

This is incorrect, from a linguistic perspective, but it's absolutely the case that if I asked 10 of my friends to describe Ä, 9 of them would say "'A' with an umlaut".

The vernacular not matching expert terms of art never ceases to annoy people, but it's not really worth fighting, I don't think.

>it's not really worth fighting, I don't think.

Absolutely.

Yet it's hardly a secret either and something you would expect someone who graduated university writing for a relatively well known newspaper to be able to get right. It's trivial to most readers of English whether they got it right, sure. It's also trivial to get it right and they did not. It looks bad and casts bad light on the newspaper for accuracy and getting details correct. Needless to say there are plenty of details that may not be as trivial to get right but are non-trivial in their effect of your understanding of the story. How does something as batshit simple as this winding up smeared on the WSJ's face in such a nothing story affect the readers' estimate of how often they get important details wrong? That assessment is up to each reader but I'm pretty sure we can all agree it probably doesn't help much.

Very few English speakers (from the U.S. at least) who've graduated college will have been taught this. I worked at newspapers and no one I worked with knew this. It's not a distinction that English speakers are aware of, even at university level, unless they have a reason to know it, like being linguists or knowing people who are Swedish.

If you're a journalist you can't ask a swedish person if you've messed up any details? That's the point. It's so flipping easy to get the detail right.

Have you considered that they knew it wasn’t technically correct and used it anyway because it was the clearest way to get the idea across?

A fun example of the opposite effect is that it took me forever to realize that Häagen-Dazs, the ice cream, is supposed to be pronounced HAH-gen-das, and not HEY-gen-das.

Yeah, I always read it as Häh-agen-das as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%84lmhult?wprov=sfla1

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