Talk:Umlaut (linguistics)

Pronouncing umlaut in common words

Umlaut is expressed by adding two dots above the letters ä, ö, ü.

Pronounciation compared to English words:

A umlaut: The ä is pronounced like the: a in apple or the ai in air.

O umlaut: The ö sounds similar to the: e in her, i in bird, ea in earn, u in burn

U umlaut: The German ü doesn’t have a real equal in English. However, maybe you know how to pronounce the letter u in French, it sounds just like the German ü.

Deannabanananan (talk) 19:00, 20 September 2018 (UTC)

@Deannabanananan: This article is about umlaut in general. The rules you're describing are for German. They could perhaps be mentioned in the article about German orthography, which has a section about those letters. But the IPA symbols are less ambiguous. English pronunciation differs a lot between different accents. For example, I pronounce the "a" in apple as /æ/, but the but the "ai" in air as /e/. So apple is probably not a very good example of an English word with a sound similar to the one you spell ä in German. As for other Germanic languages, their spellings are different, so even the Germanic umlaut article couldn't list these, as they would vary between languages.

Also, note that pairs of vowel letters together aren't necessarily pronounced like the sum of their parts: äu actually sounds like English oi. But I think the German orthography article already mentions that. – Pretended leer {talk} 22:51, 8 November 2018 (UTC)

References

Understandability

This article was tagged with {{technical}} and I've tried to make it more understandable. I'm aware that a "nearby sound" could be read as a "similar sound", but assimilation (linguistics) seems to use "nearby" this way, so I think I prefer "nearby" over "adjacent" since a vowel may change to become more similar to another vowel with a consonant between them. How much do we need to change before removing the tag? Or is it good enough now?

Also, should "speech sound" link to Phone (phonetics)? – Pretended leer {talk} 22:51, 8 November 2018 (UTC)

New — Preceding unsigned comment added by 73.10.204.64 (talk) 23:19, 26 May 2020 (UTC)