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.
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 15:11, 13 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 01:13, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Latest comment: 10 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
I've found the genitive singular diaereseōs (the length of the ō inferred from the corresponding Greek δῐαιρέσεως), the accusative singular diaeresin (see Citations:diaeresis), the ablative (?!) singular diaeresī (length guessed), nominative and accusative plural diaeresēs (one whereof on the citations page), and the ablative (and dative?) plural diaeresibus. Is there a declension-table template that can generate that, or shall I have to create a custom one? — I.S.M.E.T.A.01:35, 26 November 2014 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 3 days ago3 comments2 people in discussion
The diacritical mark consisting of two dots (¨) placed over a letter (especially the second of two consecutive vowels) to indicate that it is sounded separately, usually as a distinct syllable.
Should this be the more specific "placed over a vowel", or can a dieresis ever be over a non-vowel letter?
None of the usages in the definitions of N̈ or n̈ appear to be an example of a dieresis. They use the same diacritical mark, but the mark is not used as a dieresis. See w:two dots (diacritic) for the distinction.
