• jol@discuss.tchncs.de
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    2 days ago

    Well, my point is that it’s not considered a u, and Austrian and Swiss don’t use it.

    Also, fun fact, some romance languages like French and Brazilian Portuguese have an identical diacritic to umlaut but it’s different. It’s meant to mean the vowel is separate (like in the word naïve)

    • furry toaster@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 day ago

      in Brazillian portuguese it had a completely different meaning, and it was used for disambiguation of the pronounciation of some words, in short “gue” in portuguese can make a ghe (gh as in ghost) or a gue (gu as in guatemala), a similiar thing happens with “que”, this umlaug looklike was meant to make clear that the “u” was to be pronounced, so we had spellings like “freqüencia”

      • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 day ago

        That’s exactly the other meaning I described. In Portuguese it was/is used to separate the vowels so they are not pronounced together.

    • fibojoly@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      We call it tréma. Aka diaeresis. It explicitly tells you to pronounce two vowels near each other separately.
      A typical use is to indicate a normally silent vowel must be read out. For example “maïs” (MA-EE-S’) is completely different from “mais” (MAY).