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Umlaut (literally "changed sound") is the German name of the sound shift phenomenon also known as i-mutation.In German, this term is also used for the corresponding letters ä, ö, and ü (and the diphthong äu) and the sounds that these letters represent.
A glyph, U with umlaut, appears in the German alphabet. It represents the umlauted form of u, which results in when long and when short. The letter is collated together with U, or as UE. In languages that have adopted German names or spellings, such as Swedish, the letter also occurs. It is however not a part of these languages' alphabets.
The vowels of proto-Germanic and their general direction of change when i-mutated in the later Germanic dialects. Germanic umlaut is a specific historical example of this process that took place in the unattested earliest stages of Old English and Old Norse and apparently later in Old High German, and some other old Germanic languages.
The letter Ö, standing for Österreich, i.e. Austria, on a boundary stone at the German-Austrian border. The letter o with umlaut (ö [1]) appears in the German alphabet. It represents the umlauted form of o, resulting in or . The letter is often collated together with o in the German alphabet, but there are exceptions which collate it like oe ...
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).
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.
In linguistics, umlaut (from German "sound alternation") is a sound change in which a vowel is pronounced more like a following vowel or semivowel. [1]The term umlaut was originally coined by Jacob Grimm in connection with the study of Germanic languages, as umlaut had occurred prominently in many of their linguistic histories (see Germanic umlaut). [2]
German uses the two-dots diacritic (German: umlaut): letters ä , ö , ü , used to indicate the fronting of back vowels (see umlaut (linguistics)). Dutch uses acute, circumflex, grave and two-dots diacritics with most vowels and cedilla with c, as in French.