Orthography and typography

In this week's edition of The New Republic, an article about about Jim Sensenbrenner uses the term "über-pundit" (about Norm Ornstein).  Note the umlaut there.  Similarly, the New Yorker will add a diaeresis to vowels in compound words such as reëlected and coöperation so we don't inadvertently pronouce it "reel-ection" or "coop-eration." 

It used to be that printed matter was limited by the keys available on your typewriter.  Conventions such as replacing "ø" with "oe," "å" with "aa," and "æ" with "ae" were common among Norwegians typing letters home.  Now it's possible to produce the correct characters using the alt-sequence on your keyboard, changing keyboard layouts, or copying and pasting the characters from the Character Map in Windows.  Thanks to Unicode, pretty much any of the world's characters can be represented on a browser.  Still, a Norwegian friend of mine with the last name Søreide who works for a Swedish bank (in Norway) must accept the fact that the Swedes want to spell his last name "Söreide," which is incorrect.  (His wife's last name is Lütken, with the umlaut).  On the other hand, my friend Gunnar Sjøwall could possibly get away with reverting his last name to the original Swedish Sjöwall, though that might seem unpatriotic.

My grandmother's maiden name was Bræk, and that is also my father's middle name.  My grandmother's aunt emigrated to the US in 1909 and took the last name name Brekke to avoid any confusion. 

At what point can we say that we have expanded the official character set?  The New Republic uses the umlaut for a word that still has a foreign connotation but is rapidly becoming a standard prefix, something the magazine concedes by not italicizing it.  Using the umlaut (itself a borrowed word) is correct - that is how it's done in German.  The New Yorker uses the diaeresis for another reason, but it still calls for characters you wouldn't find on old typewriters.  As far as I know, immigrants still tend to "Americanize" the spelling of their last names to be compatible with the standard ABC's, but that may change - at least for immigrants from countries that have the Latin alphabet as their base.

Perhaps our children will learn that "naïve" is spelled the way I just did, and there are few excuses for spelling it "naive."  Perhaps people with distinctly French, German, or Scandinavian names will start to insist that their names be spelled with the original characters.  Maybe even the Icelandic letters þ (thorn - the unvoiced "th" in "think" or perhaps þink) and ð (eth - the voiced "th" in "this" or perhaps ðis) will make a most welcome comeback.

What with autocorrect features in word processing and other editing applications, it would certainly be conceivable that typing becomes shorthand, with the machine spelling it out correctly.

A revolution in spelling caused by technological innovation?  Possible, but the question would be what benefit it would serve.  Language tends to evolve in response to need, and the new characters may create distinctions that nobody really cares about.  The New Yorker practice is an affect - the mere fact that Israelis write and read without vowels at all only proves that.  It feels more authentic to write things with their original spelling, but it serves no other purpose than that.

Comments

[Peter Adler]

What strikes me as curious about the use of foreign words with original diacritical marks in printed English texts ("aperçu" is a favorite of mine) is the unevenness with which the original rules are applied. The case of über-whatsis happens to stick in my head as a former student of German. It's become an American middlebrow affectation, since it often combines the German prefix "über" (over) with some American noun. But I have never seen the über- formulation handled as all German nouns are handled, by capitalizing the noun. "überpundit" should be "Überpundit", and "übermensch", an entirely German word, should be "Übermensch". To handle it any differently is like the names of all those extinct punk and metal bands (see: Mötley Crüe): The content-free application of umlauts to indicate foreignness, with complete indifference to their actual pupose.

Perhaps the most important effect of such techno-orthographic trends may be to halt the abandonment of language-specific diacritical marks in the native languages themselves. I last studied German as an academic subject in college, more than 20 years ago; at the time, my favorite wierdo German letter, the ß (pronounced ESS-tset), was being replaced in printed German texts by a double-s (ss), primarily because of the wide distribution of inexpensive American typewriters and the practicalities of setting moveable type. When my German Jewish grandfather typed a letter to friends in Frankfurt or Berlin, he always typed a capital B and handwrote a little tail on it afterwards.

[cheryl]

I am a new grandmother, my son's father is Icelandic. I am called amma but am not sure what the correct spelling should be and I really don't want to be spelling it wrong for the next 40 years.