Three items, which, for the sake of only annoying you once, will end up in one entry.

[oloriel]

Item the first:
Happy Canada Day!
*dances to Arrogant Worms music*

Item the second:
The furry kinslayer hath* struck again. This night, he made his way into the bookshelf above my computer, where he wreaked havoc in the lines of his namesake's sons (poor Maglor was even cast off the shelf. Late revenge for throwing a Silmaril away?), threw a few books over, and eventually stole two dried roses and the pack of Moomin cookies my parents had brought from Finland, which he then dispersed on the floor of three rooms - the roses and the cookies, that is.
What a productive night.


Item the third: is of the linguistic kind.

Dear English-speaking world.

Please, please, please understand that in some languages, the little dots over the letters are not optional. Yes, I know, in your language, you only know them from "naïve", where they are diaereses and only necessary to show that the two vowels shouldn't be pronounced as a diphthong, but as two distinct sounds. The same goes for when they occur Tolkien-speak ("Eä", "Fëanor", "Eöl" etc). They're only necessary because the English language has been raped by several vowel shifts and its native speakers are now no longer capable of innately understanding that, for example, "ea" should not be pronounced like /i:/ ("eagle", "east", "ear", "neat", what have you). Even in French ("canoë"), the dots are just there to help distinguish the sounds; once you know the language, you could do without them, because you know how to pronounce the damn word.

It's slightly different with Umlauts. No, for fuck's sake, it's not "Fraulein" (unless you want to pronounce it the Middle High German way, in which case, however, it would be written "frouwlein"), it's not "Koln", and it's not "Herr Muller". I know your keyboards can't be expected to easily produce the special letters, but there's ASCII code, or ye goode olde copy&paste from a useful little file with the extra letters in it, if you think you need to pretend to use German words. And even if you can't do that: Germans use the nifty little "e" then to mark the Umlaut. "Fräulein" can be written "Fraeulein", "Köln" can be written "Koeln", "Herr Müller" can be written "Herr Mueller", etc.
You cannot, however, just drop the dots altogether. (There's actually a reason why they use the "e" of all letters, but that lies in the history of German writing, just like the reason for turning "sz" into "ß". But that would lead too far here).

Why?
Because in German (and, just so you see it's not just us Germans who're stupid like that, in Finnish, Turkish, the Pinyin transcription of Chinese, and a good lot of other languages, though some use other symbols), the dots actually indicate a change in pronunciation. It's like leaving the little hook out of the lovely French "ç". Yes, the hook is important. Otherwise, "ça" would be prounounced "ka", because a "c" followed by a dark vowel (a,o,u) is automatically pronounced "k" unless explicitly marked. - but I digress.

ä is not pronounced like the "pure" a (which the English language hardly knows anymore, although it comes close in cases like "far" or "darn"). It is pronounced pretty much like the a-sound in "man", though.
ö is not pronounced like a normal o. It's close to the "ur" in "purpose", or the "eu" in French "peuple", or the Old English "eo".
ü is not pronounced like a normal u, unless you're French and pronounce every u like an ü anyway. It's an "eeee" sound (/i:/) produced while your vocal apparatus is shaped all ready for an "oooo" (/u:/) sound. In Old English, Welsh and Sindarin, it's what's expected from you when you see a vocalic y.

You see, in some cases, these dots are actually important. "Lohnen" ("to be worth sth.") is not the same as "löhnen"/ "loehnen" ("to pay"). "Lauten" ("to sound" in the sense of "the new law sounds like this"; there isn't really an English equivalent, I think) isn't quite the same as "läuten"/"laeuten" ("to ring", as in "a bell rings"). ("au" is pronounced like the "ow" in "cow"; "äu" is pronounced like the "oy" in "boy"). There's also a small but important difference between "Plätzen"/ "Plaetzen" ("places") and "platzen" ("to burst")...
In some cases, it marks the difference between certain cases of a noun (e.g. the sing. dative of "foot", dem Fuße vs. the plural nominative, "feet", Füße/ Fuesse. By the way, note how this explains why the English plural of "foot" is "feet"!).


So. May I please ask at least you, my beloved friendlist, to henceforth go and spread enlightenment by no longer using "Fraulein" and no longer going to "Koln"? Please? Use the friendly little "e" if you don't want to look for the special characters (it's what Germans confined to using American keyboards do, too!). If someone tells you that's wrong, explain that they're sadly mistaken.
Also, learn that "Umlaut" and "diaeresis" are two different things. They both belong to the class of "diacritics", so if you just want to learn one important term, go for that. Will you do that? Please? Thanks.

Love,
The desperate anally retentive linguist

- - -
*Yes, the use of "hath" rather than "has" in combination with Fëanáro - and a consecutive linguistic rant! - was fully intentional, because I'm silly like that.

Comments

[cowboy-r.livejournal.com]

I have always tried to coöperate in this fasion, but honestly, I don't always remember which words should have umlauts. I have difficulty spelling English, as it happens; it's even worse in a language which isn't my native tongue!

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

See? If you pronounced them correctly, it'd be easy to remember...

(There are many Germans who have trouble writing Tolkienish names, such as Minas Tirith, because they pronounce the "th" as a normal "t", and thus can't remember which t the h goes after. And upon pronouncing the words correctly, i.e., the "th" as a dental fricative, they miraculously notice that suddenly the remembering is no problem...
of course, with English pronouncing things right won't help in the least, because English spelling and pronunciation no longer have anything to do with each other.)

[cowboy-r.livejournal.com]

I'm sure that, if I were to return to Germany, and speak German every day, my spelling would indeed improve. However, as I only get to speak German in the confines of my own head, there's no one to influence me into correct pronunciation. 8)

[allamistako.livejournal.com]

The "requirement" to speak proper "Tolkien" is to be fluent (or even better, native) in both english and german.

Hey, Christopher Lee said it as well, so it's not just me... ;)

[dame_grise]

Even cut and paste doesn't work on my computer most of the time.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

*snugs* This was about dropping the points in German - not in Tolkienese. ;) In Tolkienese they are, as I said above, just to indicate that you have to pronounce each vowel sound seperately, so you can actually leave them out (indeed, in the German editions, it's simply Ea, Feanor, Eol etc., because no German would have think of pronouncing those different from E-a, Fe-anor, or E-ol anyway). This is just about taking the dots off letters in languages where it actually makes a fairly important difference, and where there is a spelling convention of adding another e if, for some reasons, one's medium can't produce the "extra letters".

[dame_grise]

I don't try to type pigeon German that much. I sort of 'speak' it sometimes. But I still couldn't do the characters.

My point is that no matter what the character is some of us cannot produce it in the ways you suggested, and not everyone will know the way to change the spellings.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

True. But you do now, should you ever need it. ;)

What really confuses me is that apparently people who learn German in school are still not taught about the "e". WTF?

[dame_grise]

I checked with Chris, who's studied German (even been to Germany the lucky sod) and he says he was taught. I never studied. I picked up some spoken phrases from my parents, who'd both spent several years living in Berlin.

So basically, if you can't type the umlaut (is that how THAT is spelled?) use the 'e' after? Like in Goethe?

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Precisely!

[ladyelleth.livejournal.com]

Eh. That c/p file would be a good idea for future chats. I always do feel kind of silly to write 'Feanor' instead of 'Fëanor', for example, even though, as you stated, it's clearly optional.

As for the rest: Amen. Und Punkt.

[vashachu.livejournal.com]

Wow, I will do my best to follow the rules of diaereses! I always always forget how to make them (on the computer). I used to have a saved link to the rules, but it was disappeared when my harddrive was cleaned out a few years back. I vow to make more of an effort!

I do have to say, in the "ea" defense: I am supposed to teach (by law!) that ea follows a number of rules. First and formost, the long e (ex: each), and as varied dipthongs: long a (steak) short e (breakfast). This is only 2nd grade phonics, (7-8 yr olds) but, that's how we do it. Now whether one takes into account dialectal changes, that may have an effect. But, this is Americanized English, not the British kind. I don't know if that has any real effect on "ea."

Happy Canada Day!

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

I do have to say, in the "ea" defense: I am supposed to teach (by law!) that ea follows a number of rules...

I know, and that doesn't actually have much to do with what I meant; even following these rules, I don't think there's any word in (Modern) English, be it American or British or whatever, where the (written) "ea" would be pronounced as the "ea" should be pronounced in the above "Tolkienese" examples (namely, "e" (roughly, but not quite, the long version of the "e" in (RC) "bed" followed by the "a" in "far" (without the warbling thing that goes for an "r")). That's why Tolkien used "ëa" (or "Eä" if the e is capitalized), to indicate just that. One can leave the dots off, if one feels like it.

[satismagic.livejournal.com]

BWHAHAHAHAHA! "The mad linguist strikes again", indeed, what fun!

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

*mumbles* I have these fits, once or twice a month...

Yay, the fight for the Töddel rages on!!!

[dreymar.livejournal.com]

Most noble, most noble. My personal favourite is when the metal crowd write band names like Mötörhead while not realising how silly that makes the pronounciation. :)

Of course, we Norwegians have chosen the weirder path still - "ø" anyone?

For the typographically challenged Americans out there: Let's all give a warm hand to the US International keyboard layout! Let's get cracking: Control Panel > Regional... > Languages > Details > Add > Language: English (United States) > Keyboard layout: United States-International. (Make it your default after closing that screen, on the selection bar above.) Gee, that's too simple - I wish Microsoft would've made it at least twice as complex so even less people could've figured it out...

Now learn to use your right Alt key - or Ctrl+Alt if your keyboard is primitive!

Re: Yay, the fight for the Töddel rages on!!!

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Awww, but ø is such a pretty character. Just like å. ;)

But well, the band does call itself Mötörhead, doesn't it? (Which looks like it'd sound if a Saxon pronounced it...)

[(Anonymous)]

(The dots aren't optional in French, either. Hence the difference between "mais" ("but", one syllable) and maïs ("corn", two syllables).)

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

True. Well, French has some weird characters anyway (ç and so on), so I really should've thought of that. French always seems to kill my rants; I guess I feel safe enough to talk about it, but really don't know it well enough to actually do so ;)