In linguistics, diaeresis, or dieresis, is the pronunciation of two adjacent vowels in two separate syllables rather than as a diphthong - and also the name of the diacritic mark (¨ ) which can be used to indicate this.
An example is the first two vowels in cooperate (also spelled co-operate, or - using the diaeresis symbol - coöperate).
Use of the diaeresis symbol is increasingly uncommon in modern English usage, with The New Yorker being a prominent exception.
The opposite phenomenon is known as synaeresis.
The word diaeresis comes from Greek διαίρεσις diairesis, noun from verb διαιρεῖν diairein.
Orthography
Diaeresis, or trema from French, is also the name of the diacritic mark (¨ ) which indicates the separation of two vowels, as in Noël and naïve and the properly spelled version of the name "Zoë". (It looks the same as the umlaut, which changes the sound of a single vowel, as in German schön.)
Phonological diaeresis is sometimes indicated with other diacritics, such as the acute accent in Spanish and Portuguese. For example, the Portuguese words saia [ˈsai̯ɐ] "skirt" and saía [saˈiɐ] "I used to leave" (Brazilian pronunciation) differ in that the sequence /ai/ forms a diphthong in the former (synaeresis), but is a hiatus in the latter (diaeresis).
Notes
References
- Bringhurst, Robert (1992 [2004]). The Elements of Typographic Style, version 3.0. Vancouver, Hartley & Marks. ISBN 0-88179-133-4.
See also
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Sunday September 21, 2008 at 12:51:54 PDT (GMT -0700)
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