The New Yorker is famous for its house style of using a diaresis.

I do think, though, that the New Yorker just want to be posh in this case and show what kind of fancy things they can do. I don’t think you should or can use the diaeresis[*], [**] in this way.

From your first example, it would be quite funny to see them write zooölogical…. My take on the use of the diaeresis is that it is used when there is (not quite) the end of a syllable and thus pronunciation would be unclear. This is not the case when you just stick a co- or re- in front of a word. Also, that way of using it seems to restrict usage to ë and ï, which luckily are the characters than don’t exist in umlaut versions. If you are used to reading umlauts, reading something like coöperate is just freaky because it’s obvious that there’s a new syllable starting and thus you read co-öperate. This is not the case when reading words like Zaïre, Zoë or Noël.

A place where a point can be made for use of diaeresis (diaeres?s? diaeresi? diaeresa?) would be words like caffeïne or proteïn, to align their pronunciation with nicotine, say, rather than what you hear most of the time these days.

Of course that way of writing will not catch on as most people aren’t capable of typing anything into their computer that’s not printed on their key caps. Also, I think there are much worse inconsistencies in the way English is written (e.g. the whole ‘read’ thing).

[*] I don’t think it’s called ‘umlaut’ in this context. That term is reserved for the vowel change as you describe it later on. Looking at technical documents gives the interesting situation that the character is called DIAERESIS in Unicode (U+A8) but ¨ in XHTML.

[**] Also note how this word itself is a counterexample for the thing it describes by containing an accumulation of vowels.

… Just my ?0,02 of un-co-ordinated rambling.

And the question mark in the middle of the word where I wonder about the spelling of the plural of diaeresis is supposed to be U+12B (ī)

Sod clever software. Sod myself for thinking ‘better preview this one so you can see what the software does to your characters’ and then hitting the ‘Submit’ button. [I blame the imo non-Mac style arrangement of the buttons for that.]

My memory may be faulty, but I recall The New Yorker using umlauts for years. Maybe my brain cells need to be reëlected since I know at age 55 I have “half-heimers” and not the full blown variety as yet.

Figuring out where syllables end is a lot easier than knowing all words (which even native speakers don’t judging from the size of dictionaries) Still, native speakers are supposedly able to at least hyphenate words correctly, which at least in American English goes along syllables as well.

Just find me that dictionary….

The point is to try and imagine a foreigner learning how to pronounce the language and not knowing much about where the words come from (i.e. cooperative coming from the latin root oper- etc.).

In French we also say “tréma” for both the umlaut and the diaeresis.

BTW: Several decades ago, Germans used the macron ˉ (U+02C9) to indicate two consecutive consonants.

My point about the syllables would be that the diaeresis may just be there to indicate the necessity to pronounce a letter separately where it is not obvious. If you have Zoë, say, you need the ë to not pronounce it like Joe. At a boundary of syllables however, there is not an option of merging the two vowels, thus nobody would even be tempted to pronounce cooperative as kuperative (yep, can’t to phonetic alphabet, but you get the idea…). I think that would be a reasonable rule, that in particular rules out the examples you found. Just think hard to try and find a counterexample of a word where the diaeresis is used on the first letter of a syllable.

(However, I just learned that Encyclopædia Britannica actually gives ‘cooperation’ as an example for a place where a diaeresis (also dieresis) can be used. But frankly, I’d find an honest dictionary entry more convincing)

Oh, and I just remembered that ‘diaeresis’ is an English-only word. In German (and to the best of my knowledge also in French) it’s Trema.

Re: Mac-like… that was just a though. On the Mac, the ‘do it’ button tends to be at the right and the unusual one at the left. So I instinctively clicked on the left one as I wanted to do the unusual thing. Being a computer user means that I don’t have to read what’s on screen…

And The New Yorker editors would definitely have a problem if they wanted to be consistent when it comes to words such as zoological! I am not sure I understand your argument about syllables, though…

I’m not entirely sure what’s “not Mac-like” about the order in which the “Submit” and “Preview” buttons appear in the comments form. It’s not a dialog box, it’s a form. “Preview” is optional, so I think it’s better if the default button comes first.

One of these days, I’ll include some information about what’s accepted/processed by the comments form (i.e. by pMachine). But I’ll have to figure it out myself first :). Generally speaking, I think you can use UBB-like tags such as

url i b em strong code pre

etc. (all between square brackets, i.e. [tag]…[/tag]).

But the code tag automatically creates a new paragraph, so it’s not terribly convenient.

Dan: I’ve been reading New Yorker articles on the web for quite a while now and have never noticed this use of ¨. But maybe they automatically strip such stuff when publishing on the web.