The New Yorker stands by the dieresis

[MsAmerica]

I hate the name of this forum, but I suppose this is the right place for this article about The New Yorker magazine, which is famous for its language and fact-checking.

The New Yorker Updates Its Style Guide for the Internet Age
By Callie Holtermann

This week, the top copy editor of The New Yorker announced that the magazine had completed a “reëxamination” of its house style.

A few things were changing. But its dedication to the dieresis — those two little dots that float above certain vowels, beloved by New Yorker editors and almost nobody else — was not.

“For every person who hates the dieresis and feels like it’s precious and pretentious and ridiculous, there’s another person who finds it charming,” Andrew Boynton, the head of the copy department at the magazine, said in a phone interview on Wednesday.

The magazine, which doesn’t look a day over 100, is famous for its attachment to heterodox spelling and punctuation rules. So Mr. Boynton’s decision to announce changes to the style guide in The New Yorker’s daily newsletter on Monday was noteworthy. The revolution arrived in two squat paragraphs containing two diereses, three em dashes and four pairs of parentheses.

https://mchunguzi.com/life-style/the-new-yorker-updates-its-style-guide-for-the-internet-age/

Surely “pretentious and precious and ridiculous” IS the charm of The New Yorker.

Well...maybe to people who don't read it?

:)

I hope people don't think that taking grammar/writing seriously is ridiculous/pretentious.

There’s taking grammar/writing seriously, and then there’s elevating that seriousness to a level of pedantry that is both correct AND ridiculous, and that’s where the dieresis lands for me. I think it is arcane and silly, and I also love it.

Just my opinion as a professional editor, and someone who reads a lot of Cormac McCarthy, a man whose approach to grammar/writing many people also find maddeningly pretentious.

:-)

I have only ever seen these two dots above certain vowels when learning German and they were called 'umlauts' .

Well, I read The Road, and the only word that occurred to me was "annoying," not "pretentious." :)

Out of respect for your being a professional editor, I'm italicizing the title. May I ask what you edit, or for whom?

Hm. Good point. I've seen it in words like “coöperate,” but now that you mention it, I don't know why they don't just call it an umlaut.

A diaresis an an umlaut look the same but they do different things. As I understand it (and I'm not an expert), a diaresis indicates that a vowel is pronounced separately (as in Zoë or naïve) whereas an umlaut indicates that the vowel sound is shifted/changed. I think you only find a diaresis when there are two adjacent vowels which otherwise would make one sound (I'm probably not explaining thus very well!).

Umlaut alters the sound of a vowel according to a regular pattern; diaeresis tells you to pronounce a vowel distinctly from its neighbouring vowel. If it was an umlaut, you'd be pronouncing cooperate coeuhperate. So better not!

Perfectly explained

Yes, of course. But why need it have a different name?

Umlaut literally means a change to the sound (of the vowel)

It wouldn't be a good name for a marker telling you to keep the usual sound of the vowel.

Excuse me, but that's silly to me. Words often morph to mean something other than the original intent or definition.

Words do morph of course, but there's good reason for two different phenomena to have different names normally. And these are very different phenomena: Umlaut - changed sound. Diaresis - separation (of sounds).

They're quite technical descriptors, applied to English, and they're not likely to morph in the way words can when used often and casually from day to day. People who use them at all will usually aim at precision.

Late to this but I’ve never seen a diaresis used in words like cooperate or reexamine. A much more standard thing would be to simply spell them co-operate and re-examine. Afaik diaresis is only used in words or names of foreign origin eg naïve or Zoë.

That's a question to ask the Germans, seeing as dieresis has been around for longer as a word.

Yes - the New Yorker is famous for doing its own thing, but even in older literature, I don't recall ever seeing the diaresis used this way outside it.

That's true. They are just different things that look the same. The German umlaut was just a tiny "e" floating over a vowel to show it sounded different. The E was written as two slanting lines, so the umlaut looked like two dots. It began to be officially printed as two dots, then got the name "umlaut", meaning sound change, in the nineteenth century.

The diaresis goes back further, across languages all the way back to Greek, to show that two vowels are pronounced separately, as in naive. German even uses the diaresis very occasionally in names, but other languages use it much more.

You couldn't refer to the accent used in frühstück as diaresis. There are no vowels beside either letter u to be pronounced in a separate syllable.

There are very clear reasons for different names - they're just different things that ended up looking the same.