Talk:Heavy metal umlaut
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ÿ
>Queensrÿche went further by putting the umlaut over the 'y' in their name.
>From a linguistic viewpoint, this might be regarded as a diaresis, rather than as an umlaut.
This is wrong, the diacritic mark does not produce a diaresis here, as there are no vowels to be pronounced distinctly, like in the Spanish word lingüista (linguist, linguistic).
Motörhead & Co. do also only use the umlaut letters, but you cannot really regard the use of the letters as umlauts (in the phonological/phonetic sense), because "Motörhead" is still pronounced "Motorhead".
--zeno 19:16 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)
- On the contrary, I always go out of my way to pronounce it "Motuerhead", just to emphasise the silliness of it, likewise Blue Oueyster Cult and Murtley Crueue... ;-) GRAHAMUK 11:10, 3 Sep 2003 (UTC)
- The way Lemmy pronounces it is not standard RP English to say the least. Roughly: Mo'er'ead. On the other hand, I generally sound a bit like Frasier Crane, but I still like saying Mo'er'ead -- awright? -- The Anome 22:14, 16 May 2004 (UTC)
n-umlaut
I agree completely with zeno's comments above. None of the examples are using the "two dots" for the function of diaeresis or umlaut though I'm happy for the dots to be referred to by either name, muddling in the other senses of these words is just wrong.
And to test your browser, here is "Spin̈al Tap" rendered using a Unicode combining diaeresis - it doesn't display correctly on my machine though ):
Technically, one could "pronounce" n-umlaut, as the umlaut signifies with German vowels (front-rounding). Does any language actually have a front-rounded /n/, though? The most absurd umlauting would be "w-umlaut", since the sound that "w" stands for in English is already about as front-rounded as can be.
- No, wait, in German it's not front-rounding, it's just fronting. For example, ä is not rounded, but is fronted. So, following this reasoning, n̈ should be pronounced as a fronted n... is it possible? Isn't n already dental? How can you "front it more"?
- --Fibonacci 14:50, 7 Jul 2004 (UTC)
- /n/ is a nasal sound, produced by redirecing the airstream so it comes out the NOSE; air also goes into the mouth cavity from the lungs, but does not come out the mouth. Furthermore, this oral side-cavity is closed off in the front by the tip of the tongue, i.e. BEHIND the lips. Therefore, the air never reaches the lips, so rounding them has basically no effect on the sound (try it!). [There may be a very very slight change, because rounding the lips also moves cheek muscles, thus slightly chainging the shape of the mouth cavity, but the difference is basically not audible.] As to /w/, it's rounded, but NOT front; it's basically the semi-vowel version of the BACK rounded vowel [u]. A front rounded glide is possible; it's found at the beginning of the French words huit, huile, etc. It is just the semi-vowel version of [ü]. NathanV 10:31, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)
- Yes, the umlautted vowels in German are just like their un-umauted forms except for being fronted. ü and ö are thus front-rounded, since u and o are rounded to begin with. You can't really "front" an /n/ in any sense, unless you just replace it with another nasal sound like /m/ whose closure is further towards the front of the mouth (at the lips in the case of [m]). So I guess we should say Spimal Tap. (Actually, the Standard English /n/ is not quite dental, its actually articulated on the alveolar ridge, so you could front it a little be pronouning it with e.g. a French accent. But the difference is very hard to hear.) NathanV 10:31, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)
- I pronounce n̈ as if it is ñ, thus giving "spignal tap". From a linguistics fan POV this use of diaeresis is really bad. Rather than make them look çöøł I feel it makes them look şåð as ĥęłλ. It's just another kind of Leetspeak…
- As for w: ẅ :p — Jor (Darkelf) 23:39, 17 Mar 2004 (UTC)
The Dutch "ij".
Dear DarkElf, I might know nothing about Heavy Metal but I'm Dutch myself - and every schoolchild learns to write the ÿ at 6 years old. It's just that many people seperate it into I and J, the same way that in earlier times the A and E were conjoined (Æ) in many words originating from Latin. I've personally never seen an ÿ in French. Indeed, the Dutch refer to the "y" (without dots) as the I-grec or French Y to distinguish it from the "ÿ". Zullen we deze discussie in het Nederlands voortzetten om het de buitenstaanders moeilijk te maken? Jfdwolff 20:45, 7 Mar 2004 (UTC)
- De IJ is niet hetzelfde als de Y-grèc. Er bestaat een aparte IJ/ij (U+0132 en U+0133), en Ÿ/ÿ wordt specifiek genoemd in de Unicode beschrijving als niet acceptabel voor de IJ. Voor zover ik weet wordt de Ÿ/ÿ alleen in Frans, Welsh, en Turks (niet zeker van de laatste) gebruikt, en in enkele romanisaties (Chinees bijv.). Zie ook Dutch Y, diaeresis. Onder diaeresis heb ik een paar voorbeelden voor het gebruik van ÿ gegeven. Als je echt heb geleerd de IJ als een Y-grèc met trema of umlaut te schrijven, vind ik dat een zeer rare zaak. Ÿ/ÿ voor IJ/ij is gewoon onjuist: de enige acceptable transcriptie als de echte IJ-ligatuur (eerder gegeven) niet beschikbaar is is IJ/ij. De IJ wordt niet voor niets tegenwoordig onder de I gecollateerd in woordenboeken! (Alhoewel ik persoonlijk er meer voor voel de letter als een 26e letter in het alfabet ná de Y te zetten.) Jor 21:44, 7 Mar 2004 (UTC)
- What's an example of ÿ in Welsh? NathanV 12:14, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Ik blijf mijn twijfels houden, maar ik ben arts en geen Neerlandicus :-) Jfdwolff 10:56, 8 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Maybe some mention has to be made of the French electronic group Rinôçérôse; although it is neither heavy metal nor umlaut, something about the name belongs in the same general category. I am too lazy to find the right entry to put it in though... Speaking of such language play, I am also thinking of the recent Korean phenomenon called oegye-eo (alien language) that uses deliberate use of special characters (everything from Japanese Hiragana to Cyrillic to graphic-shape letters provided by Korean language sets) to write Korean on the web, approximating the shape of Korean (in addition to other tricks), as a type of secret language. This is mainly done by young people. Maybe I'll write it up one day.. Iceager 06:43, 13 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Shall we add in a subsection titled something like "Other gratuitous diacritics" --Christophernicus 08:29, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I've removed : (The "ÿ" is otherwise only used in old French and in some French proper nouns Never seen any case ! Can someone give a sample ? Ericd 17:36, 13 May 2004 (UTC)
The ducs de Croÿ... Nunh-huh 08:38, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)
--- This article definitely needs some phonetics, but I'm not qualified. Ericd 20:03, 16 May 2004 (UTC)
- Is used in French proper names, some place names called L'Haÿ-de-blablabla, and, AFAIK, a champagne called aÿ. (Please don't ask.) In Dutch, the ij/ÿ thing is that the two look alike in handwriting, hence handwritten ij -> ÿ. (My system's Garamond font is similar in this regard, the italics ij ligature looking somewhat between non-ligature ij and ÿ.) I have changed the article. -- de:Benutzer:Ein_anderer_Name
Much more stupid than the air guitar!
Just as I was thinking that air guitar was the the silliest thing a loser could invent, here comes "heavy metal umlaut." God, this Book of the Brain-Dead is beyond my wildest imagination.
- I thought the silliest thing a loser could invent was the wiki....
Spinal Tap
- Spoof band Spinal Tap parodied the idea still further in 1982 by putting the umlaut over the letter "n". The n-umlaut/n-diaeresis character does not occur in any known language or belong to any standard character set, and this does not represent any conventional correspondence between spelling and pronunciation.
It does occur in a small Central American Amerindian language, Jacaltec. "The following character appears here written in ASR system: n¨ (n + diaeresis)" [1] (http://www.geocities.com/Athens/9479/mayagua.html)
- Added. Wikipedia, where no detail is too obscure! :-D - David Gerard 12:34, 26 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I condensed the text of the Spinal Tap story a little (removing only the bit about Guatemala) and moved it to the caption. It has since been moved back. My thinking is this: A caption should tell something about the picture and tie the picture to the article. The tidbit about the obscure n¨ adds something that the reader won't get from looking at the picture. It makes for a perfect caption. It also makes people more likely to read that particular bit of text (as a caption) and draws the reader into the surrounding text. -- ke4roh 21:16, 26 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- I've left it out but readded Guatemala, so people will have some idea where the heck Jacaltec is from - David Gerard 21:49, 26 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- I took out "a consonant" from the text because it also appears in the latest caption. I didn't figure everything had to be in both places. In particular, I think it's a characteristic of good captions to bring out some tidbit of information not mentioned in the article. There are two other changes I would make and my reasoning:
- I would move the picture back to the left to provide visual balance (being sure to leave a blank line after the image code to avoid an ugly indentation in IE)
- I would remove "Guatemala" because people can click the link to find out that 40,000 Mayan Indians speak Jacaltec in Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico.
- -- ke4roh 03:43, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- I took out "a consonant" from the text because it also appears in the latest caption. I didn't figure everything had to be in both places. In particular, I think it's a characteristic of good captions to bring out some tidbit of information not mentioned in the article. There are two other changes I would make and my reasoning:
- While the caption may include information not found in the article (as per that link), it strikes me as a bad idea to deliberately remove material from the text to the caption. e.g. remember that, owing to the variable copyright status of Wikipedia images, most of our mirror sites don't actually pull the images or captions - so the mirrored version won't have them. The text should be complete; the captions should be strictly optional extras.
- The Guatemalan thing - again, there's no reason to cut the information and deliberately send someone off to another article when it's a single word.
- The layout looked too odd to me with the Spinal Tap logo to the left, so I put it back to the right. The break also fouls up the framing of the image box in Firefox (cuts off the bottom border) - David Gerard 09:53, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Häagen-Dazs
Is there any place in this article for the Häagen-Dazs umlaut? RickK 21:56, Jun 26, 2004 (UTC)
- Surely that's a genuine diaeresis? This is much more about bogosity in the two dots - David Gerard 22:06, 26 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- That's interesting. How's it canonically pronounced? - David Gerard 09:38, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Mentioned in latest version. - David Gerard 21:42, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)
No, this has no place in an article about heavy metal umlauts. Should be removed. Everyking 00:30, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Agreed. It's fine on the talk page, but a section saying the commercial use is unrelated to the heavy metal umlaut opens the door to saying all kinds of things are unrelated. HMÜ is unrelated to the importation of 700 German rocket scientists in Operation Paperclip after World War II, for eample, even though they brought more umlauts to the United States in their names. -- ke4roh 00:44, Jun 28, 2004 (UTC)
- If someone can write the article on the subject, it'd belong in "See also" - a good reference PDF is linked below - David Gerard 00:53, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- I would have thought that while there are few enough examples of gratuitous umlauts known outside of heavy metal, a brief mention of them here would be appropriate until there's enough material to make an article of their own. &emdash;ciphergoth 13:14, 2005 Feb 16 (UTC)
Amon Düül
The band Amon Düül not only predates Blue Oyster Cult, but they feature two consecutive umlauts in their name. I'm not sure if they count as heavy metal, but Chuck Eddy does include one of their albums (plus two by Amon Düül II) in his Stairway to Hell ranking of metal albums. Mark Desrosiers
- Well there you go. Here [2] (http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&uid=UIDMISS70406050306300345&sql=Audjv7ipjg7dr) is Amon Düül's 1969 debut album, with the double-umlauts clearly visible on the sleeve. —Stormie 05:28, Jun 27, 2004 (UTC)
- Aha, but wait a minute! The AMG says ([3] (http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&uid=UIDMISS70406050306300345&sql=B1c8j1vsjzzza)) that the name comes from "Amon being an Egyptian sun god, Düül a character from Turkish fiction." So, if the umlauts are legitimate, rather than gratuitous, it's not really a heavy metal umlaut! —Stormie 05:35, Jun 27, 2004 (UTC)
- I certainly hope we're not going to try to list every band with an umlaut in their name ... so how metal are they? Being earlier than BOC, they may rate a mention in the history. Does anyone know where BOC got the umlaut from? - David Gerard 09:38, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- Just added them to history. Were there any prominent umlauts/diaereses before this? - David Gerard 09:58, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- According to this site [4] (http://www.blueoystercult.com/History/history3.html), Allan Lanier added the umlaut. I haven't found anything else about his rationale or inspiration. This article [5] (http://www.clicknation.com/snoof/stuff/umlaut.pdf) is also worth fact-checking for additional info. Targetpuller
- Just added Allen Lanier. I did find that PDF - it would be useful for an article on commercial diacritic abuse. If there's a commonly-used phrase for the phenomenon - David Gerard 21:47, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)
should this page exist?
It's disgusting to me that this article was featured. But maybe all wikis are doomed to become masturbatory rather than useful for learning new things: see the Portland Pattern Repository.
- Personally, I think this is fantastic. It may not be high culture, but it's an excellent example of a real-world phenomenon that many people are curious about. It's now one of the examples I use when explaining Wikipedia, and it catches the imagination. It would be bad if all entries were this trivial, but a few do no harm. William Pietri 18:34 06 Jul 2004 (UTC)
- I agree fully---except with the implication that this issue is trivial. It is an interesting example of superficial borrowing in a language contact situation. More importantly, it illustrates the socially-embematic nature of orthography (cf. the ideologically-laden issue of the adoption or abandonment of Arabic script for languages like Turkish, Swahili, or Hausa). Umlauts are associated with languages that are associated in some people's minds with things like Wagner, Vikings, and Valhalla; these people seem to choose to use umlauts for the same kinds of reasons that a Hausa poet might choose to use the Arabic rather than the Roman alphabet. Although admittedly not much is at stake in the choice of a band name, the issue illustrated is clearly not trivial. This article is a good starting place for info about this. --Nathan 25 Nov 2004
- I think this is classic Wikipedia: the reader comes in looking for heavy metal info, finds it, and exits having (as a bonus!) learned about character sets and orthography. -- Karada 18:57, 6 Jul 2004 (UTC)
- And articulatory phonetics, as of 25 Nov 2004
- I totally agree. If WP stuck to so-called "worthy" subjects it would not only be dull, it would probably be quite a small and infrequently visited place. I think it's great that the whole gamut of human culture can be covered here - after all, no-one is forcing anyone to read anything. There are many pages I think are useless, but somebody thought they were worthwhile, and I can ignore what I'm not interested in. Graham 23:46, 6 Jul 2004 (UTC)
- I absolutely love the fact this article exists. It is a testament to why Wikipedia is great. Where else could you find a serious article about such a minor cultural artifact? Tempshill 17:27, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Underground Zerø?
I suspect that the ø in Underground Zerø is meant to look like an actual zero (0) character as a lot of character sets differentiate a zero from an o by placing a slash across the character or by placing a dot in the center for a zero.
If this is the case, it should probably be removed from the Heavy Metal Umlaut section. - User:Suppafly
- I'd probably want to leave them there unless and until we know for sure - David Gerard 00:16, 14 Jul 2004 (UTC)
- I think this might actually be the case, as evidenced by the kidneythieves album "Zerøspace" and the Brazilian band Zerø. Incidentally, I know the drummer of Zerø and could ask him about the spelling if there is a demand. - Christophernicus 08:38, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Flash-based commentary
Someone tried to add this link (http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html) to the article, but since it didn't directly pertain to the subject it got removed, but I liked it, so I'll leave the link here. Everyking 12:18, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- I also moved it over to Wikipedia:Wikipedia in blogs. Bryan 17:40, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I removed the link again. The link is self-reference, as an article should talk about its subject, not about the article itself. However the link would be a good external link for the Wikipedia article. Removed text is reproduced below. --L33tminion | (talk) 23:31, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC)
- Heavy Metal Umlaut: The Movie (http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html) Movie by Jon Udell
The link should stay as it is now part of the lore of this topic. It isn't discoverable on this discussion page, yet it should be.
Interröbang Cartel
The Interrobang Cartel are currently listed under the section for gratuitous umlauts and the section for non-gratuitous umlauts. Surely it's one or the other. LizardWizard 04:43, Feb 19, 2005 (UTC)
My Life in Heavy Metal link
The "My Life in Heavy Metal by Steve Almond" link has been removed from the parent site. Can anyone find a good link to replace the original? - Christophernicus 08:42, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)
- I added the cached version at the Web Archive (http://www.archive.org). --Christophernicus 06:03, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Inconsistency with other Articles?
On the Umlaut page for Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish:
- As it is not a case of marking grammatical variation, i.e., of tempus or modus, nor of syllable modification, it is neither a case of umlaut nor of diacritical marking. Hence it ought to be improper to call these characters umlauts; however, there is no more precise descriptor in English.
However, in this article:
- Umlauts are used in several languages, such as Icelandic, German, Swedish, Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, French and Portuguese...
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that umlauts/diaeresis appear in such languages, or appear in the letters of such languages, rather than say that they are "used"? That is to say, when one uses a Swedish "ä", they are not modifying an existing "a" sound, but utilizing a separate letter in its own right. Therefor the umlaut is not used, in the same way a tilde over an n, a part of the letter, is not used in Spanish (whereas other accent marks are, stress syllables for example). NOTE: I am not saying that umlauts are not "used" in German, as they are. I am also not saying that the word umlaut should be avoided when referring to Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish. Just saying the phrasing makes this article somewhat inconsistant with others. 64.162.10.162 05:50, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Tréma in French
The statement "Umlauts are used in several languages, such as Icelandic, German, Swedish, Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, French and Portuguese" seems to me to falsely imply that umlauts are a regular feature of French. With the exception of the rare examples of ÿ (which as a native French speaker I have to admit I'd never encountered,) most instances of the ¨ in French represent a tréma (or diaeresis) and marks a separation of vowels, not a modification of the vowel sound. Adjusting 08:24, 2005 Mar 11 (UTC)
Webcast about the evolution of this article: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html
On this (http://www.eschoolnews.com/eti/2005/03/000727.php) blog I noticed a link to a Webcast about the evolution of this article. It is about 8 minutes long and can be found at http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html. It is pretty cool and shows the evolution of this article from its beginning to early 2005, going into more details of some points (Spinal tap, Germanic feel, some vandalism). Really cool to watch! -- Chris 73 Talk 02:32, Mar 16, 2005 (UTC)
- Ack - it is listed above under #Flash-based commentary already. -- Chris 73 Talk 02:48, Mar 16, 2005 (UTC)
External links and references - ambiguous
Can someone split those into which are which? By that title, possible only two are used as proper references, and we don't know which ones. This is very important for featured articles. Thanks - Taxman 17:10, Apr 22, 2005 (UTC)
Die Ärzte
You mention they used the three dots to dinstinguish it from the real meaning, but maybe this meaning should also be given? I don't know how common (maybe like "kindergarten") the use or at least the meaning "Ärzte" and "Arzt" in english educated cultures is, but i'd suggest to give some sort of eplanation. (it means medical doctor somehow)
"Heavy Metal" or "Heavy-metal"?
Why the sudden change to hyphenation, i.e., from "Heavy Metal Umlaut" to "Heavy-metal umlaut"? If the discussion is of metallurgy "heavy-metal" would be correct as an adjective, but the musical genre is known as "heavy metal" -- without the hyphen even as an adjective. Reference: All Music Guide (http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&token=ADFEAEE4781ED846AE7620CC93315EC8BF7AD210DF4BF58150234558C0B2235D83176FFD0ABAD8CDAEF875B47CE3FD24A55B05D3CCFE2781&sql=77:655) --Christophernicus 06:12, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
- I agree - "heavy metal umlaut" seems to be virtually universal usage, as can be seen from the incoming links (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Whatlinkshere&target=Heavy_metal_umlaut), so I've moved it back. sjorford →•← 10:16, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)