Similar cases are Coesfeld and Bernkastel-Kues. The word neü does not exist in German.įurthermore, in northern and western Germany, there are family names and place names in which e lengthens the preceding vowel, as in the former Dutch orthography, such as Straelen, which is pronounced with a long a, not an ä.
This should never be changed to das neü Buch, as the second e is completely separate from the u: neue is neu (the root for new) followed by an e, an inflection. Consider, for example, das neue Buch ("the new book").
Names often exist in different variants, such as "Müller" and "Mueller", and with such transcriptions in use one could not work out the correct spelling of the name.Īutomatic back-transcribing is not only wrong for names. However, such transcription should be avoided if possible, especially with names. When it is not possible to use the umlauts (for example, when using a restricted character set) the characters Ä, Ö, Ü, ä, ö, ü should be transcribed as Ae, Oe, Ue, ae, oe, ue respectively, following the earlier postvocalic- e convention simply using the base vowel (e.g., u instead of ü) would be wrong and misleading. Although the two dots look like those in the diaeresis (trema) diacritical marking, a distinction should be made between umlaut and diaresis because the two have different functions. In German Kurrent writing, the superscripted e was simplified to two vertical dashes, which have degenerated to dots in both handwriting and German typesetting. Before the introduction of the printing press, frontalization was indicated by placing an e after the back vowel to be modified, but German printers developed the space-saving typographical convention of replacing the full e with a small version placed above the vowel to be modified. The diacritic letters ä, ö and ü are used to indicate the presence of umlauts (frontalizations of back vowels). Almost all German speakers consider the alphabet to have the 26 cardinal letters above and will name only those when asked to say the alphabet. Although the diacritic letters represent distinct sounds in German phonology, they are almost universally not considered to be part of the alphabet.