Typing “touché” correctly is so cliché.
Just to make sure this was clear to everyone: The abovequoted sentence, while probably true, is extrememly misleading. There are no experts who would say English evolved from any of those four languages.
French and Spanish both evolved from Latin, French with some Germanic (not German) influence. English and German both evolved from a common ancestor, along with the Scandanavian languages. The English/German/Scandanavian common ancestor and Latin both ultimately evolved from a single language. Some ancestor of that language was also an ancestor of languages like Hindi, Farsi, a language once spoken as far away as China today called “Tocharian B” (IIRC) and others.
Most of you know this, I know, but at least one of you didn’t, and where one doesn’t know, generally, several more don’t as well.
Wikipedia is a good source of info for this.
-FrL-
You are correct in that not every instance does Ñ = NN. España used to be Hispania.
The Ñ, as I said, started as a shorthand for NN. Latin cunnus became coño, Latin annus became año, and Old Italian cannone became cañón.
At the same time, medieval Latin also used the ~ to indicate that the vowel it marked was nasalized (like in modern Portuguese, where it’s used for the same purpose, as in mão and João, which in Spanish are mano and Juan).
As the pronunciation of NN shifted to a palatal nasal, and words that were spelled with Ñ started being pronounced as a palatal nasal (like año today), Ñ was generalized and used for that sound in any word, such as español (which was never espannol) and jalapeño (which Spanish didn’t take as a word until after Ñ was already being used to represent this sound).
So we’re both right – I in that Ñ started as a shorthand NN, and you in that it does not today always mean that.
BTW, much of this was stolen shamelessly from the Wikipedia article Ñ. You can read further about it there. And if you read Spanish as well, there’s a different form of the article at the Spanish-language Wikipedia.
Correct. In German the Umlaut doesn’t just alter the stress, but is simply a way of writing a totally different vowel sound. In Danish, we do the same - but instead of the Umlaut, we have ae/ä = æ, oe/ö = ø, and aa (pronounced “oh!”) = å. 5 vowel letters is not enough - we have 9 (y is also a vowel in Danish). Ironically, that still isn’t enough, and the letter “ø” (like “e”, by the way) can be pronounced in three or four different ways.
Yes, it is a tough language to learn.
The Swiss German keyboard layout accommodates both German umlauts and French accents for easy multilingual writing. As said above, the price for this is the less convenient mapping of things like square bracketsand other special characters rarely used in normal texts.
In personal names, at least, the spelling with the E can still be used I think. Josef Goebbels was not Göbbels (although Hermann Göring used the umlaut). Or am I missing something? I believe the vowel sound is the same in both names.
Are you kidding? The English speaking people won’t even dot their "i"s and cross their "t"s! Umlats? Fuggedaboudit.
Tris
Back a few years ago in my Mac using days I found a very useful little shareware application called Popchar. It would put a little icon in the menu bar, and when you clicked on it, it would give you a menu with all the characters in the current font. Just click on e with a grave accent, or c with a cedilla, also useful for selecting your dingbat.
I really couldn’t tell you if it’s still around, or would work with the current operating system, but you might Google for it.
Try reading my handwriting, where I often don’t “i” my dots.
What hasn’t been mentioned is an important event in the development of English spelling: the Norman conquest of 1066. Before then, Old English had some distinct letters not in the normal Latin alphabet, including ð (eth) and þ (thorn). After 1066, a lot of those writing English were Anglo-Norman scribes, whose first language was Norman French, and who were used to French spelling conventions. So they changed “cw” to “qu”, “sc” to “sh”, and “ð” and “þ” to “th”, resulting in English having a lot of two-letter combinations for consonants that could not be represented by the 23-letter Latin alphabet.
Later, the 23-letter alphabet was expanded by the i/j split, the u/v split, and the addition of “w”, previously written as “uu” or “vv”, but the use of two-letter combinations for both consonants and vowels stuck.
On a more general note, diacritics can be used for at least four purposes:
(1) for sounds that the normal alphabet can’t cope with, e.g., the umlaut vowels in German and “ñ” is Spanish.
(2) to mark syllables that have a strong accent, or unusual accentuation;
(3) to mark letters as separate that might otherwise be pronounced together, e.g., the diaeresis;
(4) to give tones in tonal languages, e.g., Vietnamese and the pinyin romanisation of Chinese.
English uses the first three in foreign words; can use the diaeresis in native words; but does not use tonal accents, because imported words from tonal languages lose their tones. If you do find a spelling like “Hồ Chí Minh” in an English text, English speakers will just ignore the tonal accents (though presumably Vietnamese speakers reading the English text would use the tones).
I wish we’d steal the upside-down question mark and exclamation mark from Spanish, ¡¿don’t you?!
Why doesn’t it have single keys for double umlauts, like üü?
Because only foreigners speak it with an accent.
Tha’st not heard a Yorkshire accent then, lad.
You’re asking the wrong people. This statement is entirely untrue. The English language evolved from no language that exists today. It shares an ancestor with German, but experienced a lot of change through contact with other languages, primarily Danish, Norman French, and scholarly/church Latin.
All these languages use alphabets derived from the Roman alphabet, yet Latin did not originally use accent marks.
I guess it depends on what you’d consider “relatively recent.” And don’t forget that the umlaut itself is a mutated e on top of the character. At one time, in German and in English, too, scribes used numerous shortcuts, abbreviations, ligatures, and the like to make writing faster. The umlaut is one of the few that survived and is literally an e on top of the letter – the lower-case e in Germanic black letter script looked pretty much like two vertical lines.
I think the ones you left out are the wynn, yogh, aesc (æ), ethel (œ), and the w itself.
I don’t think it has anything to do with personal names. It is always correct to write ö as oe, but not vice versa. Not all oes are ös.
Diacritical marks are usually there to signal differences in pronunciation in the context of very regular spelling systems. In German, O-umlaut is quite different in pronunciation from plain O. In French, an unaccented "e’ at the end of the word is silent, but with forward leaning accent it is pronounced roughly like “-ay” in English.
Since English spelling is so irregular anyway, using accents and other marks just would add to the confusion.
More properly it would be (Old) Norse, not Danish. Especially if you’re going to use the term “Norman French”.
It might help speakers of other languages trying to learn English from text, especially those who speak syllable-timed languages. Incorrect word stress is the major source of misunderstanding between foreign speakers and native speakers.
But then you’d have English teachers wasting their time marking up incorrectly placed diacritics.
Why don’t you use a proper encyclopædia?
I know, I’ve been guilty of quoting Wikipedia myself, but most of us, probably, have no excuse to do so. University students should be able to access legitimate encyclopedias online through their campus intranets; non-students, in many cases, can do so through their public libraries. At least, if you have a Los Angeles Public Library card, you can access Britannica online from anywhere, and I imagine other large city public library systems have the same feature.