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German has four special letters; three are vowels accented with an umlaut sign ( ä, ö, ü ) and one is derived from a ligature of ſ and z ( ß ; called Eszett "ess-zed/zee" or scharfes S "sharp s"). They have their own names separate from the letters they are based on.
The letter q in German only ever appears in the sequence qu (/kv/), with the exception of loanwords, e.g., Coq au vin or Qigong (which is also written Chigong). The letter x (Ix, /ɪks/) occurs almost exclusively in loanwords. Native German words that are now pronounced with a /ks/ sound are usually written using chs or cks, as with Fuchs (fox).
"umlaut In German placenames, ae, oe and ue should almost always be rendered ä, ö, ü. Family names, however, for the most part became petrified many years ago and there is no way of working out whether the e form or the umlaut should be used; you just have to find out for each individual" (ISBN 1843549913, 2004-07-14)
Umlaut (/ ˈ ʊ m l aʊ t /) is a name for the two dots diacritical mark ( ̈) as used to indicate in writing (as part of the letters ä , ö , and ü ) the result of the historical sound shift due to which former back vowels are now pronounced as front vowels (for example , , and as , , and ).
For example, U+00F6 ö LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH DIAERESIS represents both o-umlaut and o-diaeresis, while similar codes are used to represent all such cases. Unicode encodes a number of cases of "letter with a two dots diacritic" as precomposed characters and these are displayed below. (Unicode uses the term "Diaeresis" for all two-dot ...
Ö, or ö, is a character that represents either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter "o" modified with an umlaut or diaeresis. Ö, or ö, is a variant of the letter O. In many languages, the letter "ö", or the "o" modified with an umlaut, is used to denote the close-or open-mid front rounded vowels ⓘ or ⓘ.
Enjoy a classic game of Hearts and watch out for the Queen of Spades!
This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Standard German on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Standard German in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.