Diaresis, trema, umlaut

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A trema, also known as diaeresis, is a diacritic used to mark adjacent vowels as being in separate syllables rather than dipthongs, for example in the Dutch 'vacuüm.' It primarily appears in languages and in cases where there may be confusion.

A trema falls away when a word is hyphenated on such a syllable border.

Umlaut is generally interpreted as the diacritical mark that indicates the alteration of a vowel (Umlaut is German, meaning something like 'sound alteration').

More specifically the phonological umlaut, a vowel alteration (I-mutation, specifically(verify)).

Umlaut is also sometimes (erroneously) used to refer to the wider concept of apophony.

While we took the term from German, the Germanic umlaut is now a specific example of linguistic umlaut.

See also

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umlaut
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umlaut_%28diacritic%29
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mutation

• Ablaut and umlaut

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_metal_umlaut