The Story of The Umlaut
It's a pair of dark eyes staring out at you from a cold North European blizzard, the imprint
left by the fangs of a Black Forest wolf.
It's the scary diacritic that takes all the tough, badass associations of Gothic-Viking-Teutonic
and rolls them up into two little dots.
This idea, anyway, is how it got to be the favorite symbol of heavy metal bands
But the story of umlaut is not so tough or metal at all.
In fact, it begins quietly, in a library where Jacob Grimm, one half of the famous Brothers
Grimm worked for most of his life.
He and his brother Wilhelm combed through historical manuscripts pulling out legends,
sagas, poems, and fairy tales for their famous collections.
These old manuscripts were in old Germanic languages like Old High German, Old Norse,
Old English, Old Icelandic and so on.
He discovered among the various stages of Germanic a process of sound change where the
presence of one vowel seemed to influence a different vowel in the same word.
For example the old German word for guest, Gast, was gasti in the plural but that "ee"
ending pulled the "ah" forward to "eh" making it be pronounced as gesti.
From ah to eh you can feel the position of your tongue move up and forward, closer to
the position for "ee."
This also happens with o ö, and u ü. Grimm named this process umlaut, from "around sound."
One vowel changes because of another vowel that's around it in the environment.
There was evidence of this process all over the family of Germanic languages, including
in English.
We also once had an -i plural ending, and it left its mark as umlaut on some words that
have irregular plurals today.
But when we say umlaut we generally aren't talking about the historical sound change
process, but about the dots.
And they came about much later.
In old texts the umlauted vowels were indicated in different ways, including a tiny e on top
of another vowel.
Eventually, that tiny e turned into the two dots we know today.
That got a little confusing, because the dots were already in use in Greek and other languages
as a dieresis to keep a vowel from blending into the one next to it, so that naïve wouldn't
come out as "nayve."
Later other languages with similar fronted sounds, like Turkish, Hungarian, and even
Romanized Chinese borrowed the dots for those sounds, even if they had nothing to do with
the vowel-pulling sound change process.
But to English speakers, they were most firmly associated with the gothic, Nordic, Germanic
tradition -- only with respect to looks though.
To us, the dots themselves, the look of the thing, became more important than the sounds
they represented.
When Mötley Crüe first performed in Germany, they couldn't understand why the crowd was
chanting "muhtley cruu!"
They were probably surprised that it didn't sound as scary as they thought it looked.
In fact, to a speaker of an umlauted language, the umlauts have a different feel.
These speakers experience them as soft, light, and round.
And they have strong associations with adorableness.
Because the diminutive -chen and -lein endings trigger umlaut, It shows up pretty regularly
in words for small, cute things.
That's, not very metal.
In any case, in the decades since Blue Öyster Cult put rock dots in the metal tradition,
the umlauts have slowly had their fangs removed.
From Häagen Dazs to Yogen Früz to IKEA products, the umlauts have become to us kinder and gentler,
more modern Scandinavian social progressivism than dark medieval forests.
Headbangers looking to get the scary back might want to check out the "pf" cluster or
"scharfes s."
That's the way to be pfast and pfurious.