On 9/1/2011 11:45 AM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
typewriter). Dutch does have one native use of the umlaut (though it has a different name, I forget which, maybe trema :-),
You remember correctly. According to https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Trema_%28diacritic%29 'trema' (Greek 'hole') is the generic name of the double-dot vowel diacritic. It was originally used for 'diaerhesis' (Greek, 'taking apart') when it shows "that a vowel letter is not part of a digraph or diphthong". (Note that 'ae' in diaerhesis *is* a digraph ;-). Germans later used it to indicate umlaut, 'changed sound'.
when there are two consecutive vowels that would normally be read as a special sound (diphthong?). E.g. in "koe" (cow) the oe is two letters (not a single letter formed of two distict shapes!) that mean a special sound (roughly KOO). But in a word like "coëxistentie" (coexistence) the o and e do not form the oe-sound, and to emphasize this to Dutch readers (who believe their spelling is very logical :-), the official spelling puts the umlaut on the e. This is definitely thought of as a separate mark added to the e; ë is not a new letter.
So the above is trema-diaerhesis. "Dutch, French, and Spanish make regular use of the diaeresis." English uses such as 'coöperate' have become rare or archaic, perhaps because we cannot type them. Too bad, since people sometimes use '-' to serve the same purpose. -- Terry Jan Reedy