Say Ää.
Ää.
Say Öö.
Öö.
Say Üü.
Üü.
Very good.

I'm pretty sure I didn't miss a lesson on umlaut that was any more sophisticated than this in 1988 when I started learning German at school, but I only noticed yesterday that you only see umlauts in stressed syllables. That's sixteen years less a week or so.

I've only just noticed this because the same rule applies in Estonian, in place of vowel harmony. Veps is somewhere in between Estonian and Finnish in this respect, apparently. The vowel õ, which is a sort of schwa (and close to how most English people pronounce ö in German), gets more common the further south you go, and the Livonians can't use it often enough. Is the umlaut-only-in-stressed-syllables rule the result of influence from the Baltic Germans? Somebody must know, somewhere, surely? I'll explain you the Baltic Germans later.

posted at: 21:28 | path: /D | permanent link to this entry