Talk:dieresis

either "dieresis" or the alternate spelling should be defined

it's the two dots above vowels in various languages but a proper definition needs to be a lot more rigorous and def-writing is not my specialty. Everybody is welcome to contribute. Consider this a stub. — Hippietrail 14:59, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)

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(This comment also on dieresis and umlaut)

1. The diaeresis doesn't just serve the purpose mentioned here. It's used differently in Spanish (possibly also Catalan), and differently again in Russian. It's also used in Chinese Pinyin, Swedish, Hungarian, pedants in English, and in place of macrons in transliterations.
2. I'm with you on disliking the confusion with umlaut but that doesn't stop almost everybody using it as a synonym, and in fact it is more common than this word amongst people I know by a wide margin. Other dictionaries accept this so we should too. — Hippietrail 14:50, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I still think this article is wrong. I see "umlaut" used in standard and technical speech all the time. It's overwhelmingly more common. Unicode calls it an umlaut and that's pretty technical, for one example. "di(a)eresis" seems to be used when speaking of the vowel disambiguation function technically except in regards French where the term "trema" may be more common. I still don't like it but if we're describing the language then this is the way it's used. — Hippietrail 01:15, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)