Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT: 2445-2449 (13-17 May, 2013) Weekly Comic Discussion Thread
ankhtahr:
Interestingly enough the German and English Wikipedia article about the German Alphabet have contradictory statements.The German one explains that it contains 30 letters, the English one explains that it has only 26 letters.
In German "Umlaute" (plural) are indeed a class of vowels. For a German native speaker the word Umlaute means all three, Ä, Ö and Ü. The little dots are only called diacretics.
Loki:
Afaik, the letters are taught as "a-umlaut", "o-umlaut" and "u-umlaut" to non-native language speakers, respectively.
German Wikipedia, however, is once again inconcludent on the matter.
* The article on Ä says "it is used to display an A with Umlaut or A with trema". "The A with Umlaut is not part of the German alphabet".
* The article on Ö says the same.
* The article on Ü says "it consists of an U with trema and is an Umlaut".
* The article on the German alphabet says that "it consists of the 26 basic letters of the Latin alphabet plus the umlauts (Ä, Ö, Ü)". Which would indicate that Ä,Ö,Ü are Umlauts and not A/O/U with Umlauts. Note this is in direct contradiction to the article on the letter Ä.
* The article on Umlauts says that "the expression is used [...] for special symbols of the German alphabet, which depict the respective sounds of New High German, that are linguistically-historically i-Umlauts: ä, ö, ü (and the diphtong äu)."
So apparently it can mean either the sounds, or the graphemes, which are part of the alphabet, but aren't. :psyduck:
....and I got ninja'd by ankh. I am gonna post this anyway.
pwhodges:
And so we are reminded that Wikipedia is only as authoritative as the last person to edit it...
Soulsynger:
All of the three letters Ä Ö Ü are Umlauts. (Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. :-D )
They actually ARE in the German alphabet, same as ß (the Buckel-S) just not usually recited.
Ä can be written as AE
Ö can be written as OE
Ü can be written as UE
ß can be written as SZ, it is most commonly used to elongate the vowel preceding it.
Redball:
My dad came back from Germany after WWII with a typewriter which had separate keys for Ä Ö and Ü, which left me with the impression that they could be seen as separate letters. The fact that there are no separate keys for those characters in my computer, that at least in the U.S. they're created by using the A, O and U with other amending keys makes them look like variations of those keys, those characters, instead of separate characters. Does that make sense?
As for speaking them, in singing music in German, I recall that those sounds were formed by adding kind of an R sound. I know, I know, I should be googling for a word with an umlaut and listening to it.
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