Lëärn Tö Ümläüt

I'm sure all of you have seen those foreign looking dots over words of German origin, or at least seen them on the names of numerous metal bands (Blue Öyster Cult, Motörhead, Mötley Crüe, Maxïmo, Infernäl Mäjesty, and possibly the worst, Spın̈al Tap). This is this eponymous umlaut.

The actual name for those dots is a dieresis, which comes from Ancient Greek διαίρεσις, meaning 'split'. And that's just what a dieresis normally does. You may have seen words such as naïve and Noël before - they are imports from French, where normally the orthographic vowels would represent diphthongs (a diphthong is when two vowels make up one syllable, like the English word I - it's a combination of two vowels, the first is sound of the <o> in mop, the second is the <i> in bin). We pronounce naïve and Noël, in IPA, as /na.iv/ and /no.ɛl/, because the dieresis tells us to split up the vowels.

From e's to ̈

So what the hell does this have to do with Blue Öyster Cult? German, through its linguistic evolution, had some changes in its vowels. It's nothing unusual, English did as well (look up the Great Vowel Shift to see how all the English vowels went berserk in the 1300s or so), but German decided to mark the newly-formed vowels since they were unlike the already existing ones. The German scribes took to putting a small, tiny <e> over the vowels in question - a, o, and u. This miniscule e degraded into a pair of lines, until final it emerged as just two dots over those three vowels, yielding ä, ö, and ü. (Fun fact: this process occurred in English too, but we never added the dots, and the new sounds ended up disappearing anyway).

Now, the Germans didn't just arbitrarily add some polka-dots to three vowels for ornamentation, these new letters where represented three new sounds that hadn't previously existed before. They had been fronted. Fronted? Yes, fronted.

Charts are great for watching vowels go haywire

Vowels are (as we know) pronounced in the oral cavity, AKA, the mouth. The way a vowel sounds depends on three main factors - how high/low the tongue is (in comparison to the roof of the mouth), how far front/back the tongue is (in comparison to the back of the mouth), and whether or not the lips are rounded (forming a circle) or unrounded (in a more... normal position). If we look at our handy-dandy chart of vowels, you'll see that they are plotted in accordance - the left is the front of the mouth (near the teeth), the right is the back (near the throat), the top is... well, the top, and same for the bottom. And as that chart says, vowels in pairs (like /i/ and /y/) are respectively unrounded and rounded.

The three German vowels that were affected were back vowels - /o/, /u/, and /ɑ/. Through a process called assimilation, or also confusingly called umlaut (not really confusingly, but it can be confusing when the phenomenon and diacritic have the same damn name), the vowels moved forward in the mouth (retaining their roundedness) because a vowel that followed them in the next syllable was also in the front (normally /i/). The first vowel assimilated, AKA got more similar, to the following one in an effort to ease pronunciation - the tongue gets to stay in the front for the whole word. In this change, /o/, /u/, and /ɑ/ became (respectively) /ø/, /y/, and /ɛ/ in modern German (by technicality, /ɛ/ is both raising and fronting, but I'm trying not to split hairs).

So then... why am I describing this phenomenon? Because I fucking hate the heavy metal umlaut, as it is called. I really do. It's there for decoration, and as far as I am concerned, umlauts should be used for pronunciation. That is also why I HATE Spın̈al Tap's name - you can't umlaut a fucking n, it's not even a vowel!

Don't even get me going on faux Cyrillic.