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In phonology, hiatus (/ h aɪ ˈ eɪ t ə s / hy-AY-təs) or diaeresis (/ d aɪ ˈ ɛr ə s ɪ s,-ˈ ɪər-/ dy-ERR-ə-siss, - EER-; [1] also spelled dieresis or diæresis) describes the occurrence of two separate vowel sounds in adjacent syllables with no intervening consonant.
the diaeresis (Zoë), indicating a second syllable in two consecutive vowels; the macron (English poetry marking, lēad pronounced / l iː d /, not / l ɛ d /), lengthening vowels, as in Māori; or indicating omitted n or m (in pre-Modern English, both in print and in handwriting).
In English language texts it is perhaps most familiar in the loan words naïve, Noël and Chloë, and is also used officially in the name of the island Teän and of Coös County. Languages such as Dutch , Afrikaans , Catalan , French , Galician , Greek , and Spanish make regular use of the diaeresis.
A complementary term is merismos (cf. English merism: parsing or the distinguishing of parts, as opposed to diairesis, which is the division of a genus into its parts). For example, in the Sophist (§235B), the Eleatic Stranger is examining illusions, which consist of words and "visual objects."
In poetic meter, diaeresis (/ d aɪ ˈ ɛr ə s ɪ s,-ˈ ɪər-/ dy-ERR-ə-siss, - EER-; also spelled diæresis or dieresis) has two meanings: the separate pronunciation of the two vowels in a diphthong for the sake of meter, and a division between feet that corresponds to the division between words.
Ï, lowercase ï, is a symbol used in various languages written with the Latin alphabet; it can be read as the letter I with diaeresis, I-umlaut or I-trema.. Initially in French and also in Afrikaans, Catalan, Dutch, Galician, Southern Sami, Welsh, and occasionally English, ï is used when i follows another vowel and indicates hiatus in the pronunciation of such a word.
Ü (lowercase ü) is a Latin script character composed of the letter U and the diaeresis diacritical mark. In some alphabets such as those of a number of Romance languages or Guarani it denotes an instance of regular U to be construed in isolation from adjacent characters with which it would usually form a larger unit; other alphabets like the Azerbaijani, Estonian, German, Hungarian and ...
The most familiar to English-language speakers are the diaeresis and the umlaut, though there are numerous others. For example, in Albanian , ë represents a schwa . Such diacritics are also sometimes used for stylistic reasons (as in the family name Brontë or the band name Mötley Crüe ).