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Comment by porphyra | Hacker News Reader

The Economist magazine uses a diæresis (two dots) in words like “coöperate” and “reëlect” to indicate that both vowels are pronounced separately, rather than as a diphthong. This is considered old-school and uncommon though.

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Unless The Economist does it as well, you were probably thinking of The New Yorker.

https://www.arrantpedantry.com/2020/03/24/umlauts-diaereses-...

Oops I think you are right. My parents subscribed to both and I must have mixed them up.

That is the fun thing about English. There isn't really a single right way to speak or write it. It is defined by common usage. As long as your audience understands you, it is correct.

As someone else pointed out, loan words often have accents. At what point does jalapeño become en english word? There is no other english word to refer to the pepper, therefore it is now an english word and therefore english words can have diacritics.

The closest thing we have to a source of truth for the english language is the OED. It isn't prescriptive, it just lists how words are used rather than how words should be used.

Jalapeño is in the OED with the tilde https://www.oed.com/dictionary/jalapeno_n?tab=factsheet#1253...

> That is the fun thing about English. There isn't really a single right way to speak or write it. It is defined by common usage. As long as your audience understands you, it is correct.

That's how all languages work - to the chagrin of l'Académie Française - English is no special exception.

I like to believe that, by definition, the only person who speaks English properly is the King of England. Everyone else has an accent.

I see naïve as an example of diacritics in English as well.

I find it interesting that the Spanish consider the ñ to be a separate letter, in their 27 letter alphabet.

The double l "ll" is also a separate letter and is pronounced the same as y in "eye"

Learning the relationship between a diæresis and a diphthong and then seeing that the word diæresis contains a diphthong has rounded out my day nicely, thanks for that.

I enjoyed learning recently that the most common diacritics in Czech are the háček and the čárka. The word "háček" has a čárka followed by a háček, while the word "čárka" has a háček followed by by a čárka!

A "calque" is a word that's been brought from one language into another by translating the individual parts. A "loanword" is a word that's been brought over by just taking the word with little modification.

For example, "calque" is a loanword, while "loanword" (from German "Lehnwort") is a calque.

Similarly, a grave accent is sometimes used in poetry to indicate that a single vowel is voiced - e.g. in "cursèd" to indicate that the word should be pronounced as two syllables "curse-ed", rather than a single syllable "curst".

Loanwords often retain their accents as well: cliché, façade, doppelgänger, jalapeño.

But it's habanero, not habañero - people mistakenly put the ñ by analogy with jalapeño.

The adjective "learnèd" (meaning "well-educated") is a native English word that should take the grave accent even outside of poetry. Also "unlearnèd".

Winged and legged are still pronounced like that too, at least by some.

Interestingly, as an addition to the parent comment, there's a certain point in time where a lot of -ed words are often spelt -'d, which presumably is from the transitionary period between the expectation that the -ed was pronounced and today's general pronunciation.

You see this in Shakespeare's plays, "-ed" endings are the equivalent of "-èd", whereas "-'d" is pronounced "-ed" as is common today.

Oddly enough, I pronounce 'legged' that way, but not 'winged'.

e.g. "Long legged monster"

There’s also the (dying) use of diareses to indicate vowel stress, for example coöperative or naïve.

I’ve always seen it written with an acute accent: ‘curséd.’ Wikipedia notes both usages, but to my knowledge I have never once read a poem which used a grave accent that way.

Used to just be a dash, like re-elect. Cooperate was co-operate. People got tired of writing dashes and they got shortened.

The Economist uses diacritics in French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish words, but deletes the diacritics from other languages (or maybe they keep them when they happen to resemble diacritics from those languages). I think I once saw a letter from a Hungarian complaining about that: a word they'd used meant something silly or obscene after they'd removed the diacritic.

Most publications are haphazard like this. The diacritic example also applies to Vietnamese, despite the alphabet coming from Portuguese.

Similarly, Chinese and Korean names are usually written in the order they are pronounced, while Japanese names are reversed.

>Similarly, Chinese and Korean names are usually written in the order they are pronounced, while Japanese names are reversed.

As a Chinese speaker this is maddeningly confusing when reading Western media. It's also a fairly new trend, I want to say a decade ago Chinese and Korean names were also read in Western order.

That seems like a quirk of the magazine for thsie pstticular words, but its more common for some others like "naïve" and "Zoë", although that's gone out of fashion somewhat since computers took over (and I believe both of those are loan words in english)

I love this, because I always do a double take and start pronouncing it as coOUUUperate and REEEElect, giving me much entertainment (I am easily entertained!).

Edit: also see rôle, which invokes this classic: https://i.redd.it/qrfr7o4ue2z51.jpg

Oh interesting, I've never seen those cases. I'd say it's more common (although maybe still a little old-school?) to use it in words like Noël or Chloë.

The difference is whether the sequence of vowels crosses the morpheme boundary or not. When it does, as in "cooperate", it's usually readily obvious to native speakers even when seeing the word for the first time, thus they don't need a mark to disambiguate.

I don't remember ever seeing that in The Economist.

I think you're thinking of New Yorker magazine, perhaps?

Fascinating. I had wrote that off as a bug in their CMS.

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