Umlauts are exӧtic!

Americans love Umlauts, they just look super cool. Those two dots on top of the letters a, o and u are simply divine. The sideways colon on top of vowels, as described by a German store owner on Facebook make any word appear “exӧtic”. Heavy Metal bands like to use umlauts to make their names seem super bad as “rock dots” per Wikipedia. Mӧtley Crüe, Motӧrhead, and Queensrӱche are a few examples of heavy metal ‘badness’ that was achieved with rock dots or umlauts. Queensrӱche did not even use a letter that is generally umlauted by German standards, but it made an impression on my teenage mind. The series “American Horror Story” is truly frightening not only because of its subject matter but because they turned the letter o upside down and put the umlaut dots underneath. Gasp, that is scary! While the company Häagen-Dazs uses the umlaut to convey old world quality in their ice cream product.

With these exciting uses for umlauts in the American culture, it is hard to assign a true value to the Umlaut. Is it just there to pepper the language to make you feel rebellious, scared or like someone wants to give you a big, sweet, ice cream hug? Is there a rhyme or reason for them other to influence how the reader perceives a product? Well, actually umlauts were not designed for marketing purposes at all and have a very distinct place in the German language.

A little history, when the printing press was developed by my hometown hero, Johannes Gutenberg around 1440 he had to decide how to represent the spoken word in writing. The spelling of German was very phonetic at the time and had not stabilized because print had not been invented and books were handwritten in monasteries by scribes. The monks would draw the letters one by one as they spelled things the way they perceived them. There was no way to make spellings uniform across the country, perhaps they could control what happened within their own monastery but as people worked in different areas their language developed according to their local micro culture. Books were very expensive and the monarchs only needed scripture, church, and government documents to control their populace. Readers and literature for the common person was not available until after the printing press.

The printing press was still not as fast as we can reproduce materials today, but it was faster than writing by hand. The letters had to be individually aligned on the plate by hand and then a piece of paper could be “stamped” with the image that it represented. All of this had to be done in mirror image and took a lot of time and a lot of little letter pieces. To save time and little letter pieces the printers came up with a few shortcuts. The American saying, “You must mind your p’s and q’s” refers to the fact that the letters p and q are mirrored symbols. They are also mirrored to b and d the other way. The printers could use the same little metal piece for four letters but had to pay special attention to how they inserted the piece as it could change the meaning. Not only was the printing process laborious, the paper was expensive. By combining letters, printers could save paper. One of these ways to save space was to combine letters that always made the same sound into the space of one letter slot. The combinations of ae, oe and ue were initially stacked on top of each other where the e was on top of the leading vowel, later they replaced the e by the colon piece to make ä, ӧ, and ü symbols. There is one more letter the printers used to save space which is the symbol for a sharp s or double s which is β. They simply stacked two s letters in one space and created the β.

The umlaut is literally translated as um=around and laut= sound or around sound. In German, the a is always pronounced “ah” and the e is always pronounced like in the word “every”. When blending the two sounds together they arrived at the sound that is now represented by ä. The same goes for o (always pronounced like the English oh in German) and e which makes ӧ and the combination of u (always pronounced like the English oo in German) and e to make ü. While these around sound letters and the β are not in the German alphabet they are used in proper spelling of German.

Understanding the sounds that umlauts represent, their reason for existence and their general purpose helps students use them correctly in German. They also understand their own culture better by understanding how the umlauts have been used in a different context and quite effectively to market a product, whether it be a band, a television program or ice cream. Umlauts make the language sound softer and gentler and if the heavy metal bands had realized that, they may have gone with the β. The β is a harsh and slightly hissing s sound that would make any German umlaut blush if they knew how they have been chosen to represent rock bands and horror instead of just sweet, delicious ice cream.