Hacker News Reader

The formal name for it is diaeresis [0]. The New Yorker is famous for being a high-profile publication that enforces its usage.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)

View on HN

Notationally I wish the diaeresis was a single dot. It bugs me that we’re using two dots to separate two syllables, yet both dots are over the second syllable. Plus a single dot would avoid ambiguity with the umlaut (though I suppose there are very few words with both features).

A Tittle for a single dot is a lovely word: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tittle

Your idea is unfortunately naïve about current usage.

A lot of glyph based idiosyncrasies like that in languages scripts are artifacts of the era of physical block types before we had shit like hot cast linotyping where the blocks were made on demand.

What probably happened is umlauts were used a lot in German and some lazy typesetter wasn’t going to waste a perfectly good block sitting around that he could reuse

Initially I thought the grandparent was just making some fun of a mistake, but I ended up learning something new. Thanks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com