Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 June 6

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June 6

purpose of spacing diaeresis

Other than referring to itself, what's the point of the spacing diaeresis U+00A8 <¨>? It's in the oldest layer of Unicode, so I would think there's some use for it, but haven't been able to think of anything. (I have for the spacing variants of most of the other common diacritics, with the exception of the cedilla, which seems similarly pointless.)

I see that some fonts place it over the following letter rather than giving it its own space. Is it supposed to replace the dead key diaeresis on a manual typewriter? — kwami (talk) 02:00, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

It's for compatibility with pre-Unicode encodings, in this case ISO/IEC 8859-1 code point A8. There were no combining characters in those legacy encodings. 82.166.199.42 (talk) 08:01, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Ah, thanks. — kwami (talk) 08:02, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

The various diacritics have a stand-alone version, which is useful if you want to discuss diacritics and their appearance. For example, U+00A8 is used in our article Diaeresis, in the sentence "It consists of two dots ¨ placed over a letter, generally a vowel; ...". (The box around the ⟨¨⟩ is drawn by the template {{char}}.)  --Lambiam 08:40, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Sure, but Unicode says it's equivalent to docking the diacritic to a space. I was wondering if there were any other use, apart from referring to itself. The macron, acute and grave, for example, were once used as IPA tone letters, and the circumflex and caron are used as tone letters in Lahu. I figured someone must use the diaeresis for something, I just haven't been able to find any examples. — kwami (talk) 08:44, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Have you read Diaeresis (diacritic)? Shantavira|^{feed me} 09:03, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

I don't see anything there. What am I missing? — kwami (talk) 09:50, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Section Diaeresis (diacritic)#Modern usage lists multiple examples of modern usage in several languages, "naïve", "Boötes", and "Noël" among them. --CiaPan (talk) 10:31, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

That wasn't the question. What use is the spacing diaeresis? Does it mean anything in any orthography? Is it used is math or logic? etc. — kwami (talk) 10:34, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Kwamikagami -- In ASCII, a several characters were ambiguous with spacing diacritics, so that ` could be a spacing grave accent, ' could be a spacing acute accent, etc. In that usage, the diacritic characters were displayed by overprinting, either backspacing with character ASCII 8, or by doing a carriage return with character 13 but not doing a linefeed with character 10. The official ISO documentation for ISO/IEC 8859-1 (which was incorporated into Unicode as characters 160-255) is behind an obnoxious paywall, but you can look at the equivalent ECMA 94, which declares that "None of these characters are `non-spacing'." -- AnonMoos (talk) 21:28, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. I've merged the articles until someone has something for a spacing diaeresis (or cedilla, which I wouldn't expect). — kwami (talk) 23:50, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

I don't know if Wikipedia has anything on Snoopy lineprinter calendars, but they were well-known among US computer nerds in the 1970s, and were printed out in a similar way -- several CR characters were sent to the printer for every LF character to get overprinting... AnonMoos (talk) 20:44, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

Pronunciation in a Metallica song

In "No Leaf Clover" for some reason the words "time" ("And it feels right this time") and "line" ("Turned it 'round and found the right line") are pronounced unusually, as [ta:'em] and [la:'en]. Was it tailored just for this song or reflects some US regional accent? Brandmeister^talk 13:05, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Southern American English does realise /aɪ/ as [aɛ] or [aə]; but the lengthening of the second part of the diphthong is extraordinary indeed. 82.166.199.42 (talk) 13:44, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Hetfield wouldn't have a southern drawl as his native accent? (It seems as if he grew up in California, but maybe his parents were Southern.) 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 20:36, 6 June 2023 (UTC)

Sometimes singers deliberately inject slightly odd pronunciations to pique the attention. Consider what Tatiana Shmayluk* of Jinjer does with "loyalty" in the first verse of their 2017 live recording of 'Pisces'. That's not native accent (Eastern Ukraine Russian) or poor English (she has a literature degree and is very particular about diction), but a deliberate ploy.

(* To avoid arguments over Ukranian/Russian spellings, a sensitive topic, I've used the one from the band's official label releases.) {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.221.195.5 (talk) 03:41, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

A deliberate Southern stylisation I suppose? Western American English is described as "entirely rhotic", but take a note of his pronunciation of thunder and wonder near 1:20. 213.137.65.242 (talk) 07:25, 7 June 2023 (UTC)