My last mention of Eggers’ book is another quote I meant to write up yesterday:

Instead, he says, “He changed his name?”

“No, he died.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“No worries,” she says.

Fish pulls out of the parking lot and onto the frontage road. No worries. He wants to tell her how much he hates that expression, but doesn’t. “Don’t worry” makes sense, is a pat on the arm, a reassurance from one person to another, but “No worries” implies that there aren’t any worries anywhere in the world, and that’s just not true. (Eggers, How We Are Hungry, pp.77-78.)

I say “no worries” a lot. Hmmm. I should quit that. I agree with him.

Unrelatedly: The other day, in the first year of secondary (approximately 7th grade), one of the students asked how to say diéresis in English. The diaeresis (that’s the word in English, although there’s some variation in spelling) is a diacritic mark, which is to say it’s a mark that is added to another letter to indicate something, usually pronunciation. (Diacritic marks are really fucking cool; they’re most interesting perhaps in Hebrew, where every vowel is represented so (see: the wiki article if you have more interest in this; I didn’t really read the page, to be honest, because I speak no Hebrew). But they’re neat in general, and more often used in Spanish than in English. In English, we have a few words with diaeresis, and a few accents, but not much else. In Spanish, they use the tilde (eñ, which is the symbol above the n there and also the way such an n is described), as well as the cedilla (Barçla;a is short for Barcelona). And, of course, accents constantly.)

Anyway, right, in Spanish the diéresis is used solely to indicate when a u is to be pronounced, as near as I understand. So there’s a metro stop called Argüelles, which is pronounced Ar-gway-yase (if you say that with an American accent, anyway), more or less. Without the diaeresis, it’d be Ar-gay-yase; the g-followed-by-u stops you from pronouncing the g like an English h. Right? Anyway, so this kid asked how to spell his last name, which I believe is Yagüe, a name I’ve seen a bit around here. And I told him that I thought we called that sign an umlaut*.

We do, sort of. An umlaut is the German word for the symbol, and it is a word for it that we use in English (although the two can look different). However, an umlaut changes the pronunciation of a letter; in german, a sounds different from ä. So it’s not that I was wrong, but rather that, well, okay. I was wrong. His name has no umlaut in it; it has a diaeresis. The diaeresis’ function is to indicate that you pronounce the vowel differently, yes, but not in the same way. In Spanish, it turns the sound from a single vowel (eh) to a diphthong (uay), where there are two vowel-sounds combined. (We worked a bit on English diphthong pronunciation this week and last, in some of my classes. I like the word a lot. Diff-thong.)

My error was based in the fact that, a, I’d only heard the term diaeresis once or twice before, and b, the way you write the diaeresis in HTML is to write ü, for example, to make ü — the uml standing for umlaut. I looked this up the other day, told the teacher, and found myself really interested. (The teacher was vaguely interested, but honestly I’m just geeking out; I don’t blame her for not caring.)

In English, a diaeresis does something sort of different. It tells us not that the vowel is pronounced, but that it is pronounced separately — that the two vowels are a hiatus, rather than a diphthong. We don’t really use them anymore; we just expect people to learn when they pronounce words thusly. But The New Yorker magazine still does use them — coöperate, for example, or naïve — and so do some people. It does make sense, after all; it’s also pretty. (Better, certainly, than writing co-operate, which people sometimes do.) Zoölogy is another good example — the presence of the diaeresis indicates, hey!, this isn’t pronounced zoo-ology, but rather zo-ology. Of course, so would simply looking at the word. (You can pronounce it zoo-ology if you want; I think that pronunciation has actually become more common, but that doesn’t make it correct. (On the other hand, people who talk about this often also insist that the word forte should be pronounced like the word fort, but that’s not quite true.))

I think that’s more than enough on language. I’ll go be a bit more productive before I head to bed.

* I should mention that whenever I think of the word “umlaut” and umlaut sign, I think of Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, which makes a play of the word, and the first real story I ever tried to write, a fantasy story I wrote in seventh grade with a character with an umlaut in her name.