FunWiki: UmlautSuite

A short lived suite born in the spring of 2000 after the large number of room swapping that went on between the fall and spring semesters of the 1999-2000 academic year. It's members have now been scattered across other dorms and schools. A pity, since it had a really cool name. Hopefully, its brief existence will not be soon forgotten, and perhaps a successor suite will be able to take the name up again in the future.

Suite Origin: According to an extremely biased white board poll and the word of the esteemed DoctorEsner, the suite encompassing E163 and E165 shall from now on be known as UmlautSuite.

umlaut n.

	a. A change in a vowel sound caused by partial
	assimilation especially to a vowel or semivowel occurring
	in the following syllable.
	b.A vowel sound changed in this manner. Also called vowel
	mutation.

	The diacritical mark placed over a vowel to indicate
	an umlaut, used in multiple languages, though the only
	one EdMiller knows is German.

Ah, it exists in Spanish as well, though only in a few choice words such as bilingüe, pingüino, and averigüe --NunchuckFrosh
- Technically, is that actually an umlaut, or is it just a thingie which indicates "oh, look, these are two different vowels, not a dipthong" (like the French "maïs", the Quenya "Eärendil", or the English "coöperate"), which looks the same but has a different name that I forget? By which I suspect you mean 'dieresis'? Probably.
  - Um, the umlaut dots are there to change the function of the u to keep the g soft. I'm not enough of an expert to get too technical but I believe it's a true blue umlaut. Or something. --NunchuckFrosh
  - The double-dot symbol placed over a letter is called a diaeresis or dieresis (die-AIR-uh-sis). It is an umlaut only when doing that wierd vowel-sound thing to it, as described above. The Spanish diaeresis is not an umlaut because it is not providing the same function, but instead separating the vowel from the surrounding letters, as does the English one (my personal favorite example is preäntepenultimate, meaning fourth-to-last). Conversely, any other orthographical marker, like accents or circumflexes or cidillas or what-have-you, can be an umlaut if it signifies the appropriate vowel change for whatever language happens to use it. The sound can also appear in a language without a marker to denote it, as in the French u. -LoganGordon

Members include:

CategorySuitePage