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Umlaut

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Epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänköhän

Eh?

--
Physicians deafen our ears with the Honorificabilitudinitatibus of their heavenly Panacaea, their sovereign Guiacum.

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Årë ÿöʉ sp€ⱥkïng Fïnnɨ§h?

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Looks like it. :-)

Anyways, I find my placement of the umlaut dead key really handy. It's so easy (to me at least) to hit AltGr+semicolon, especially using the Wide mod. So I find it easy enough to write German and Swedish with the standard Colemak[eD]*.

I've even taken to writing Norwegian with it. Even though it isn't optimal for my language, I find that the convenience of using vanilla Colemak[eD] and having the brackets easily accessible for coding etc outweighs the little extra effort involved in writing æøå (which, after all, I don't do all that often these days!).

Käy metsolan halki nyt retkemme tie! ^_^


_____________________________________
*: Edition DreymaR

Last edited by DreymaR (02-Jan-2018 09:42:41)

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Ei saa peittää, and that's how far my finnish stretches. I'm using the standard eD as well for English, German and Norwegian, and it works pretty well for it :)

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Ei saa peittää, indeed! The greatness of Colemak must not be covered up! ^_^

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DreymaR said:

Ei saa peittää, indeed! The greatness of Colemak must not be covered up! ^_^

That's a quote I think most people of my generation and a bit older will get :p From times sat on the toilet without something to read ;)

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Explanation for our non-Nordic readers: Ovens used to have warning text in all the Nordic languages. The Finnish translation of "do not cover" is "ei saa peittää", which the nerdier among us would end up remembering for life! ^_^

"Käy metsolan halki nyt retkemme tie!" is from a Finnish drinking song, and iirc it means "Forward in our forest, on our golden fields!". Finland is quite famous for forests – and drinking...

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DreymaR said:

Explanation for our non-Nordic readers: Ovens used to have warning text in all the Nordic languages. The Finnish translation of "do not cover" is "ei saa peitt", which the nerdier among us would end up remembering for life! ^_^

"Käy metsolan halki nyt retkemme tie!" is from a Finnish drinking song, and iirc it means "Forward in our forest, on our golden fields!". Finland is quite famous for forests – and drinking...

I can't imagine how you'd go about pronouncing ää.
Perhaps it's sound you make when being examined by the dentist??

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stevep99 said:
DreymaR said:

Explanation for our non-Nordic readers: Ovens used to have warning text in all the Nordic languages. The Finnish translation of "do not cover" is "ei saa peitt", which the nerdier among us would end up remembering for life! ^_^

"Käy metsolan halki nyt retkemme tie!" is from a Finnish drinking song, and iirc it means "Forward in our forest, on our golden fields!". Finland is quite famous for forests – and drinking...

I can't imagine how you'd go about pronouncing ää.
Perhaps it's sound you make when being examined by the dentist??

Well, it's a bit difficult to explain, as far as I remember though finnish in contrast to norwegian has differences by vowel length (Norwegian makes the difference on consonant length) and ää would be a long ä sound, which is a near-low front unrounded vowel,  which woud be similar to the sound that you'd make in chim-ae-ra I think, it's at least the one that I make when I pronounce the word :) or the first a in american affect, just dragged out a bit :)  the tt makes the t sound "strong"

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It's pretty much like the word for bleating: Bääh! Määh! ;-) In Norwegian, we'd write that 'bæ'; the digraph letter 'æ' used to be in English but it's fallen into disuse except for some archæically inclined people.

The letter 'å' is in use in some non-Nordic languages like Schwabian German, but not very common. It came from the old ǫ sound, as in the English rune FUThORC.

The letter 'ø' is specific for us Nords I think, but similar letters are found elsewhere. It's also written OE whenever you don't have the 'ø' or 'ö' letter handy, which is related to the French (and older English) œ/Œ digraph.

More specifically:
ä/æ – 'bad', 'had'
ö/ø  – 'early', 'nerd', French œuf/bœuf/œuvre/cœur
å/å – 'ought', 'awe'

Last edited by DreymaR (05-Jan-2018 13:20:51)

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DreymaR said:

The letter 'å' is in use in some non-Nordic languages like Scwabian German, but not very common. It came from the old ǫ sound, as in the English rune FUThORC.

It's also used in Austrian dialects like Corinthean to represent a long oa sound in some words like Leberkås (Leberkäse in Hochdeutsch) or de Klåne (der Kleine) which somehow makes sense, since the o sound from oa wandered on top of the a. I was really confused the first times that I saw that letter here in a newspaper :p

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Yes, it's cool how many of the accents and special letters are ligatures, some made by medieval monks to save space:

ç – cz
ñ – nn
å – ao/oa
æ – ae
œ – oe
ä/ö/ü – aͤ, oͤ, uͤ (ae/oe/ue)
& – et
ß – ſs

Note: 'ſ' is the long 's', the old form inside words in analogy to Greek σ vs ς; some decades ago some names like Aftenpoſten could still be found written with it. No idea why it's behind the "end" 's' in 'Adresſeaviſen' though! The people in Trondheim are crazy, so it might be just that... ;-)

• Accent acute and grave (´/`) are "pure" accents however, noting a tone and/or emphasis going up/down.
• Unfortunately, some clueless people will use these for apostrophes etc.
• Other "positional" accents are hacek (ˇ), dot above/below, double acute (˝), macron (¯), ...
• The Circumflex (^) accent was invented to be a general accent, combined from acute and grave!
• In French, circumflex usually means a historic 's' ('hostel' → 'hôtel'; 'coste' → 'côte', etc)
• So it'd be a tad cooler if the French had an s-based accent for this – but there are too many already...
• Not sure whether hook/horn ( ̉/ ̛ ) and ogonek (˛) are "letter" or "positional" accents?
• Slash/stroke is somewhere in between an accent and an element of special letters like ø, ð, Đ, ħ, ɉ, ł etc
• Macron (¯) may take the place of the less well implemented stroke in some cases; Lithuanian Ō is similar to our Ø I hear
• In Swedish and German handwriting, a macron is used as a "lazy umlaut", writing ō/ā for the more cumbersome ö/ä
• I've decided that I'd like to do that in the Nordic scripts, but it won't happen of course! ;-)
• One nice thing about that would be that we Norwegians would move our stroke, while the Swedes would connect their dots
• So it'd be the most "democratic" way of arriving at a common script for the Nordic languages! :-þ

In conclusion: Yes, it's Friday and I'm having a hard time concentrating... ;-)

Last edited by DreymaR (05-Jan-2018 14:19:05)

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DreymaR said:

Yes, it's cool how many of the accents and special letters are ligatures, some made by medieval monks to save space:

ç – cz
ñ – nn
å – ao/oa
æ – ae
œ – oe
ä/ö/ü – aͤ, oͤ, uͤ (ae/oe/ue)
& – et
ß – ſs

Note: 'ſ' is the long 's', the old form inside words in analogy to Greek σ vs ς; some decades ago some names like Aftenpoſten could still be found written with it. No idea why it's behind the "end" 's' in 'Adresſeaviſen' though! The people in Trondheim are crazy, so it might be just that... ;-)

• Accent acute and grave (´/`) are "pure" accents however, noting a tone and/or emphasis going up/down.
• Unfortunately, some clueless people will use these for apostrophes etc.
• Other "positional" accents are hacek (ˇ), dot above/below, double acute (˝), macron (¯), ...
• The Circumflex (^) accent was invented to be a general accent, combined from acute and grave!
• In French, circumflex usually means a historic 's' ('hostel' → 'hôtel'; 'coste' → 'côte', etc)
• So it'd be a tad cooler if the French had an s-based accent for this – but there are too many already...
• Not sure whether hook/horn ( ̉/ ̛ ) and ogonek (˛) are "letter" or "positional" accents?
• Slash/stroke is somewhere in between an accent and an element of special letters like ø, ð, Đ, ħ, ɉ, ł etc
• Macron (¯) may take the place of the less well implemented stroke in some cases; Lithuanian Ō is similar to our Ø I hear
• In Swedish and German handwriting, a macron is used as a "lazy umlaut", writing ō/ā for the more cumbersome ö/ä
• I've decided that I'd like to do that in the Nordic scripts, but it won't happen of course! ;-)
• One nice thing about that would be that we Norwegians would move our stroke, while the Swedes would connect their dots
• So it'd be the most "democratic" way of arriving at a common script for the Nordic languages! :-þ

In conclusion: Yes, it's Friday and I'm having a hard time concentrating... ;-)

That's a lot of cool info :)

I already do that lazy thing with ø when I write in cursive I learned to write it as something between ō and ó and that stuck with me :)

in addition to all the one you mentioned there is also @ that came from ad

The ae oe, and ue that merges to become ¨ make more sense with the old Sütterling writing of german, where the e looked almost like a cursive n, which in stylized form lost it's middle connection.

Vietnamese looks kind of crazy with the tone marking and such, there we really have accent galore, would it even be possible to write it with colemak? I know for japanese, chinese, russian and korean I'm just piping it through the IME, vietnamese looks kind of interesting ;)

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I didn't mention the @ because its origin is in fact disputed. But yes, 'ad' is one of the hypotheses. Another is 'ea' for 'each at'.

With my PKL files, I can write Vietnamese! This is to a large extent due to the fact that I've adapted and expanded on the extensive Bépo project dead key tables. Together with the nice work of Fárkas Máté in making the PKL dead keys chainable, of course.
• To write Thích Nhất Hạnh (cool guy – check him out!), I'll press AltGr+(',6)→a for the and AltGr+1→a for the .
• For his birth name Nguyễn Xuân Bảo I'll write AltGr+(`,6)→e for and AltGr+2→a for .
• Another fun letter is , for which I write AltGr+(',3)→u.
• (The '3' dead key is used for hook "above" u, although hook-above-a is on the '2' dead key; it had to be like that because of ủ I think...)

The sequence of accents should be invariant in these cases, but if some letters get tricky then you may try reversing the accent sequence.

Vietnamese is a fun language in this way: I get to use the accents on many keys (at least {`,1,2,3,6,',\} – acute, grave, hook/horn, tilde, underdot) for one language!

Last edited by DreymaR (05-Jan-2018 16:06:59)

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DreymaR said:

Yes, it's cool how many of the accents and special letters are ligatures, some made by medieval monks to save space:

Interesting... so really it's a hangover from when paper was expensive!

They do present problems/inefficiencies when in comes to typing, so I'm certainly glad English hasn't got them. But the downside of not having them is inconsistent spellings.

Ideally what you'd want if you were designing an optimal language, is no accents, but each letter or combination of letters having the same sound wherever it appeared. But weirdly, even Esperanto has circumflex characters!

Last edited by stevep99 (07-Jan-2018 13:51:05)

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stevep99 said:

Interesting... so really it's a hangover from when paper was expensive!

Actually it's more an hangover from when much time was used to copy books by hand, So it's not that much about the paper really, but more about the time used to copy a book, as writing out every word of a book is very time consuming.

stevep99 said:

They do present problems/inefficiencies when in comes to typing, so I'm certainly glad English hasn't got them. But the downside of not having them is inconsistent spellings.

English has quite a lot of ligatures really, just like fi and fl in many typefaces, but because of the way that fonts are built up you don't notice it when you're writing, unless you're writing in a very big font. The computer deals with the ligatures for you. When it comes to ø, å and æ in Norwegian for example we treat them as normal characters, and we need them, because Norwegian is more rich on vowels than English, (~14 in Engilsh, ~20 in Norwegian).

stevep99 said:

Ideally what you'd want if you were designing an optimal language, is no accents, but each letter or combination of letters having the same sound wherever it appeared. But weirdly, even Esperanto has circumflex characters!

I don't see how accented characters are that big of a problems really, as most languages that use them are more consistent than English, and it also groups similar sounds together. Languages that are using clusters for sounds are usually changing them through the times, and you get inconsistencies, while it seems like accented characters are less volitile in this regard. Czhech for example has quite a beautiful alphabet, where the sounds correspond nicely to the characters, and the accents are used well to show differences between the letters. So don't base your assumption on your English-based bias against accented characters :)

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The price of writing was both: Parchment and vellum were both expensive, as was good ink. Educated work force, by comparison, was cheaper than now I believe, but still costly.

There's a difference between stylistic ligature – which is often handled automatically by word processors to produce prettier print – and digraphs based on ligature like æ which have taken on a special meaning. One may share SteveP's view that these special letters and accents complicate stuff needlessly, but I don't think it's that simple! I think it's useful to have a rich language in which distinctions are made between sounds. I wish English had kept its þ letter despite the advent of lead type which came from the continent without that letter. That'd led to more, not less typing efficiency! And accents are often efficient too, making it possible to compact writing.

As SteveP says, English spelling is a travesty. The ten ways of saying -ough is the worst example of this. In fact, the -ough stems from another letter/rune in old English, the Yogh. Again, German typography was lacking so they just spelled everything they couldn't write properly as '-gh' leading to this mess. ;-) Had they been a little more ahead of their time, they might've used the gamma for instance – but then the problem would've been that its minuscle looks rather like an y... which again was used instead of the þ rune (the English Thorn rune looked somewhat like an Y). This is the reason for all those "Ye Olde Pubbe" signs: The proper pronunciation of "Y" in this case is in fact "Th"!

But I agree that there should be less of a profusion of these elements. As mentioned, I'd be happy to sacrifice the Ø in my name even, for a more streamlined and universal Ō. And I think the Dutch are best served by simply writing IJ instead of having a special ligature glyph for it – the special glyph may of course still be used stylistically! But I'm not sure whether we should merge æ and ä into ā...? Probably, if we do ö and ü at the same time, but I really like the æ! But hey, not gonna happen anyway so yeah.

Not sure whether Vietnamese really needs so many accents or whether they could cut down a bit to reduce the need for multiple accents on each letter? They do already use the circumflex which is intended as a multipurpose accent, as well as the tilde, so I'm not sure what they could do beyond this.

At any rate, with my Colemak[eD] mappings I find it easy enough to write all sorts of accents and ligatures.

In sum, accents and special letters are useful but there are probably too many of them as it is.

Last edited by DreymaR (08-Jan-2018 13:11:45)

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I can see the original logic behind accented characters - if you are writing on paper, they give clear guidance on how to pronounce words.
My point is though that with the move to the digital age - where people do more typing than writing - they are a burden. You end up either needing more keys, or the use of combinations/compose key type arrangements.

If the aim is to get consistency between written and pronounced words, I'd sooner map sounds to pairs of letters, rather than use accents, so that the number of distinct characters you need to type is minimized. In fact, even the 26 in English arguably too many - you could get rid of Q for example! Or replace it with "ye olde" thorn as DreymaR points out.

I wouldn't object if there were *modest* proposals for English spelling reform. There have been attempts but often these are too radical and put people off. Unfortunately, most people are too set in their ways and will defend illogical choices to the last in the name of tradition.

Last edited by stevep99 (08-Jan-2018 12:54:03)

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The Thorn letter (which ought to look like þ and not like Y!) should replace 'th' bigrams, certainly not Q! I wish we had it and ð back in Norwegian too; they vanished in the 12th century and since then we can't hear the difference between a 'tak' (a take, a grip) and a 'þak' (a roof).

I believe the Q is useful enough, all languages considered. In English though, if it were possible to make things more efficient one could generally spell 'Qu' → 'Q' because this is nearly always the case (as in Scrabble!). But people would have qalms about it and the resulting unrest would be hard to qell. ;-)

Scandinavians and Germans wouldn't be too happy if we had to write AE/OE/UE/AO consistently for ÆÄ/ØÖ/Ü/Å, nor would the Spanish & Friends like to revert to NN for Ñ. Same with the French and Ç vs CZ, etc. In these cases, the letters in question are relatively frequent in their languages and writing two letters for one would be undesirable.

I believe keyboards could fit in a couple more keys without breaking. The ISO board has one, the Brazilian board two and the Japanese/Korean boards a whole little collection. Then we'd have room for a couple more interesting letters and gamers would be happy too I guess. And people who didn't need so many keys could map them to Extend keys instead! ;-)

Last edited by DreymaR (08-Jan-2018 13:22:47)

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DreymaR said:

The Thorn letter (which ought to look like þ and not like Y!) should replace 'th' bigrams, certainly not Q!

What I meant was, instead of Q you could pretty much always write K or Kw. Then, if we wanted to keep 26 letters in total we could have thorn back instead, so that we could distinguish between the hard and soft TH sounds. Mind you X isn't much use either, and is a not very good as a letter as a cross has too many other uses.

DreymaR said:

I believe keyboards could fit in a couple more keys without breaking. The ISO board has one, the Brazilian board two and the Japanese/Korean boards a whole little collection. Then we'd have room for a couple more interesting letters and gamers would be happy too I guess. And people who didn't need so many keys could map them to Extend keys instead! ;-)

There are only about 30-something decent key positions on a keyboard, so I'd say the fewer symbols the better.The fact that there are the extra keys on the far right for brackets and punctuations is because of more symbols are needed to be typed than there are good spaces for. The situation is made worse in some languages when these keys are assigned to other, accented letters, leaving less space for symbols.

Extend and custom AltGr layers certainly help a lot, but as we know, we are weird outsiders in adopting such things. Most people simply suffer with awkward pinky stretches.

But I take the point, it's going to be easier to fix the keyboard than to fix language :P

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I didn't mean very good positions, but I'm a fan of having some extra keys for symbols and/or special letters. In other words, pretty much as it is but I'd like a couple keys more. The right Shift bar is way too fat for instance, and the Back key should've been split too. Likely Caps as well. This'd give us more to play with for special needs. Certainly not for frequently used letters! And indeed, the arrow key island etc can be dispensed with using Extend.

I think that removing Q and X etc would break too much. Sounds nice until you consider all the repercussions for the sum of all languages...!

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To be honest I was pretty interested because of the title "Umlaut".
sotolf: Do you speak German?

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Last edited by tanjajung (19-Jan-2018 21:12:52)
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tanjajung said:

To be honest I was pretty interested because of the title "Umlaut".
sotolf: Do you speak German?

Hehe, it's more or less the name that is used in English speaking countries for the ¨ letters I guess that's why.

I do speak German, how good I speak it though is another story. I work in a company where I do communicate completely in German, and I'm living in Kärnten, but my grammar still sucks :p Ich sollte eigentlch mehr deutsche Bücher lesen, aber ich bin leider zu faul :p

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Umlaut is one of the functions of the two-dot diacritic, signifying a change in the vowel sound. The German word Umlaut, for our English-only readers, means "about-sound".

Diaeresis or trema is the other function of the same typograpic element. In this usage, it means that two adjacent vowels should be pronounced separately. It has fallen into disuse in English, but the old way of writing it would ensure proper pronunciation of words like coöperation ("co-operation", not "coop-eration") and reëlect ("re-elect" not "reel-ect").

Auch ich spreche ein bißchen Deutsch. Doch finde ich es zu schwierig, "Streichholzschächtelchen" geschwindig zu sagen... ;-)

Last edited by DreymaR (17-Jan-2018 16:07:08)

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DreymaR said:

Diaeresis or trema is the other function of the same typograpic element. In this usage, it means that two adjacent vowels should be pronounced separately. It has fallen into disuse in English, but the old way of writing it would ensure proper pronunciation of words like coöperation ("co-operation", not "coop-eration") and reëlect ("re-elect" not "reel-ect").

Yeah, I think they use that in Dutch quite a lot, since ee would be a long e sound, they use the diaersis to "cut the vowels apart" in words such as creëer whick looks kind of funny :p At least it's not as effed as in russian where e (ye) and ë (yo) are two letter, but people don't feel like writing the dots over the second, so they only use the first, since it's predictible from word stress which is which, the problem however is that wordstress isn't very predictible unless you're russian :p

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