I was about to Have Opinions about the threats the US is making to Greenland, Denmark and Europe, then realised I have nothing useful to add, so I pressed Delete.

@CiaraNi @hanscees Sorry for being boring, but just felt like writing this: (And you probably know this already, but others might not.)

Personally I use the term "umlaut" only to describe the phenomenon in German and Swedish (and possibly other Germanic languages) where the spelling of a word changes when it is inflected in plural so that to an "a" or "o" the two dots are added. Like "Apfel" (apple) (singular) -> "Äpfel" (apples) (plural), or in Swedish "man" (man) -> "män" (men).

But not all instances of ä or ö in German or Swedish are umlauts. For instance "Käse" (cheese) in German or kärna (kernel) in Swedish are not plural, and are not some other inflection either of a corresponding word without the dots. There is no corresponding word "Kase" or "karna".

@CiaraNi @psneeze Went down a fun path - cause fada means 'long' and it elongates the vowels... got curious and now know umlaut apparently word roots are 'about sound'

@CiaraNi
well, there's this: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%BCmlaut

@CiaraNi nor is there an apostrophe in the word apostrophe, nor . . . [you get the idea]

@CiaraNi Could manage one on a diëresis.

@czottmann Haha, danke very much, that's a pleasing collection of letters

@shivers @CiaraNi I never knew that.

@wannabemystiker I know, right? When Mette Frederiksen is finished with Trump, we'll ask her to get on to fixing this next.

@tanghus @wannabemystiker That's a very interesting article. Thanks for sharing it. I've bookmarked for a deeper read later.

This pleased me to read:

"Men det er ikke danskerne syd for stødgrænsen der udtaler ordene underligt. Faktisk er det underligt at danskerne nord for stødgrænsen overhovedet begyndte at ’støde’.

@BooksandJohn We should really do something about that

@CiaraNi Maybe you could say in a Northern Irish accent and call it an an umlaüt? That's the only way I can see to put one in without mangling the sound of the word.

@tanghus @hanscees Ha - it does actually have a kind of sexy aura in Anaïs. I waver between thinking the New Yorker is being pretentious and thinking the New Yorker is keeping good linguistic traditions alive, depending on how good a lunch I had on the given day I'm thinking about it.

@log That'd do

@timtfj Ah sure let's put at least two of them in there while we're at it. There are three vowels, so that'd still be quite restrained.

@CiaraNi @hanscees

@CiaraNi maybe it's like how you're not suppose to use a word as part of the definition for that word.

@bracken I had to think about that for a second. I think you're right.

@CiaraNi @walfischbucht It seems Estonian has got it right with their word ‘täpid’ for ‘umlaut’. And Finnish has a word ‘ääkönen’ meaning ‘any Finnish letter with an umlaut’, and it's really just the word for letter (‘aakonen’) with umlauts sprinkled on it.

(according to Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/umlaut#English, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%A4%C3%A4kk%C3%B6nen#Finnish)

@headword @walfischbucht 'Täpid’ - that's more like it. I'm going to need Germans to speak Estonian from now on, so, please.

Also, thanks for this information. Very pleasing to learn.

@headword @CiaraNi @walfischbucht
Aakonen: Regular letter.
Ääkönen: Fäncÿ lëttër.