Hello everybody,
Gale is right:
1. My family comes from the KOH halfway between Hanover and Bremen. My father could cary on a conversation with his Danish brother-in-law, but had difficulty talking to his German brother-in-law from further south in Germany.
Another example:
The regional dialects don't change much (except for new words), being still very strong. So is the accent, even in "textbook German". In the sixties, we lived in a village in Baden, and downstairs was a young family from L�beck. When the town crier made an announcement, reading a text typed in standard German, the young lady would come to my mother to have it translated. His accent was too strong for easy understanding.
However, I believe that umlauts were used for specific purposes, like underlining. You don't do it without a reason.
Right again. The umlaut dots on vowels DO change the sound: "a" like in English "half" becomes "�" rather like the sound in English "where", o and u change too. The Roman alphabet does not contain these dotted vowels, they are rendered by the writing ae, oe, ue. At the end of mediaeval times the e became tiny and went to sit on top of the vowels, there are many handwritten and printed examples. In (handwritten) Gothic script the e is rather elaborate, so the writers replaced it by two downstrokes ( " )which eventually became dots ( � )in modern machine script. German children still learn to write two downstrokes.
But the dots on the y don't change anything. Meyer or Me�er is pronounced exactly the same. Those dots DON'T mean an umlaut here.
My own Meyer ancestors are written indifferently, and at the same period, Meier, Meyer, Ma�er. One explanation is that you can't take the i or y separately. In this combination these letters form, together with the preceding e, a "diphtong", literrally a "double" sound. While you produce it, you change the position of the tongue in your mouth, moving it closer to the roof . You really produce two sounds following each other closely (try this by pronouncing "hi, bye, why, pile"), the second sound being close to the sound produced in German "jetzt" or English "yet" (both words having the same ethymological origin).
The y was introduced in the alphabet at a time when j did not yet exist as a letter. The Dutch wrote y where they now write ij. The use of y after e became a habit to state clearly the diphthong sound. The dots (real round dots, not downstrokes!) on the y were introduced to avoid confusion with the Greek y (Epsilon, in German Ypsilon) which the Germans pronounce like �. People forgot about the difference between downstrokes and dots, and used one or the other on the y, up to the end of the 19th century. I found my great-grandfather Maria Heinrich August "Ma�er" with two downstrokes.
Real dots are used for other purposes, too. The town of Soest (with a long o) is sometimes written So�st: this states the fact that there is NO umlaut sound � there. The French use dots to separate o from a following e like in No�l (No-el), different from soeur pronounced like English "sir".
Philip at first misunderstood my original message:
Colette has re-stated the conventional view, which relegates _�_ to a scriptal flourish.
So the dots on the Y are NOT an umlaut sign (German "umlauten" meaning
"change a (vowel)sound"). Wedeme�r or Wedemeyer are pronounced exactly
alike. The e following the y doesn't change the pronounciation.
I wrote to him directly, since I didn't want to annoy the list with very long explanations. Only I saw today that people seem still interested: hence this lengthy contribution.
Best wishes from
Colette
(German having studied linguistics)
www.llorca.ovh.org