• barsoap@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    like how German vowel letters with umlauts (Ä Ö Ü Ÿ) are spelled with an E at the end (AE OE UE YE)

    There’s no Ypsilon Umlaut, in fact y basically only occurs in loanwords nowadays, it was used instead of i quite a bit in previous spelling versions and names are conservative, thus those stuck around (Bayern, Mayer, etc). Likewise, Goethe is still Goethe it’s an Umlaut but never spelled with ö, the th also isn’t in use any more according to modern spelling it’d be Göhte.

    Then there’s the ß which by now at least has a capital version but the Duden still didn’t get around to changing the replacement form from ss to sz.

    You also occasionally see ë and ï those aren’t Umlauts but French-style diaresis, signifying that the vowel combination they’re in isn’t a diphthong. Alëuten, Piëch, Zitrön.

    • current@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      Some people in my family line (a long time ago mind you) had “ÿ” in their surname, it came from a Russian name with “Се” (or maybe it came from the Polish counterpart spelled with “Sie”?) which they spelled with “Sÿ”. Apparently the letter was used in German writing occasionally around that time period. I thought that was pretty interesting.