Diaeresis

[MauriceTheMussel]

Any experience with a name with diaeresis, please? Is it a pain on forms? Does a passport exclude them etc?

Secondly, would it be “correct” to have diaeresis on Raphael?

Dear god

My ds has a diacritic over his name.

we used it for forms because most were handwritten when he was smaller!

we Don’t tend to use it for typed forms and it isn’t on his current passport.

I would assume you were French if you used it. Definitely not needed in the English form of the name and obviously not in the Italian. Why not make life easy?

Oooh, did the circumflex make it on to your passport?

I don’t mind the diaeresis not being on passports and driving licences but I would like it on the birth certificate, but worried about how that may or may not translate to other docs. Essentially, if it were ok the birth certificate but not on anything else official, totally fine. I’d still handwrite and text and whatnot the diaeresis version.

Um it's not a name. It's punctuation: Umlaut in German .

But maybe you were joking ? oops

God it's too close to diahroea 🤮 don't name your kid that

DD is a Zoë. She and we like the diaresis but it does tend to get left off things like labels in school (she goes around adding the dots!)

As long as you accept that people may not use it, I think it is "proper" (and somehow makes the name prettier to my eyes!)

Btw you would be surprised at how many people (supply teachers!) call her "Zo" to rhyme with toe...

Sadly not - the "little roof" is confined to the birth certificate. I do use it if I am handwriting but never when I'm typing which is 99% of the time now. It appears on all official documents as y rather than ŷ

I have a Zoë - her brother is Joseph so yes we have a diaeresis. Plus I think they’re cööl.

OP it has caused the grand sum of zero issues so far. She’s only 3 but birth cert, passport, doctors, hospital, school applications, general life - zero issues.

I reeeeally fucking hope the people thinking it’s a name are joking. God help us 🤣

If it's Raphael, I would say it would eventually be dropped anyway - Raphael is pretty much universally pronounced in English as
Raff-ay-ell

It's not like the upward mobiity aspirations of the Brontë family, who were "Brunty" two generations before the talented sisters wrote - I think it was their father, Patrick who gentrified "Brunty" to "Bronte" to "Brontë" which indicates that the final vowel ë is pronounced cloer to "ay" than "eh".

@MauriceTheMussel isn’t suggesting using it as a name, @DiscoBob - it is a mark placed over a vowel - Zoë instead of Zoe, for example - it means both vowels are pronounced.

Might be worth checking with local council as I don't think you can have that on a birth certificate in UK, generally hyphens and apostrophes(e.g Mia-Rose and Bob O'Marley) are permitted but nothing else.

I don’t think it’s needed with Raphael. Maybe with zoë. Pain in bum though and I reckon it will just get left off.

I’ve always called it an umlaut-didn’t know there was a different term!

They're not quite the same. An umlaut changes the vowel, a diaeresis prevents two vowels from combining, e.g. naïve is nah-eve not nayv. @PrissyGalore

I think Ellipsis is lovely for a girl. If it feels too unusual she can go by Elly at school…

It really does sound like an awful medical complaint - a mixture of diarrhoea and enuresis. Sorry OP.

Or even two dots placed over a vowel....

Irritable vowel syndrome?

Happy to see that this thread doesn’t disappoint 😁

Well, it helpfully distinguished Dd from the other Zoe in her class, although I hadn’t really planned for her to be known as ‘Zoë with the two dots’.

I still like it but she’s found it a bit annoying as secondary school computer system couldn’t cope with it and she now writes it without. My mother, who tried hard but it was beyond her, came up with a surprising array of random accents on random letters of my Dd’s name.

😅

I love that Mumsnet lists ‘diastassis recti surgery’ as a similar thread

Fucking hell I'm a mug. I genuinely thought they were saying it as a name. I missed the 'with'.

My mum is an English teacher so I'll tell her and she'll kick my arse.

Sorry OP and I'm glad I'm not the only one who got the wrong end of the stick...😂