Diaeresis

This diacritic— ¨— is a diaeresis. Okay?

The two dots over a letter are a diaeresis. The mark indicates that, when two vowels are next to one another, there is a syllabic break between the vowels. Got that? You see this mark in words like “naïve,” with the diaeresis indicating the start of a second syllable. Without the diaeresis, we’d all be pronouncing it as “nave,” not the correct “nigh-EVE.” It’s also in names like “Noël” so when we were singing Christmas carols last month, we were singing the first “No-el” and not the first “Noel.” A diaeresis is also helpful to people named Zoë so other people do not drive them insane when they pronounce that name as one syllable. Okay?

Technically, you should be using a diaeresis in words such as “cooperation” so you pronounce it as “co-OP-er-ate” and not “COOP-er-ate,” which would make you sound like an idiot. But these days, pretty much only the New Yorker still uses diaereses that way.

What a diaeresis is not, and I cannot emphasize this strongly enough, is an umlaut. This is a mark of punctuation indicating that the vowel in question is pronounced like the sound of another vowel. Okay? This is common in German-derived languages.

Thus, the diacritic in the name of the singer Björk is an umlaut and not a diaeresis. Got that? This means that the “O” is pronounced slightly differently, not that her name is two syllables. In this way, the names Björk and Zoë could not be more different.

I hope you’re getting all this because we, as a society, do need to understand the difference between a diaeresis and an umlaut as diacritics that signify two distinct phonological phenomena.

Join me next time when I give an urgent lesson on the differences among the hyphen, the en dash and the em dash.