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Diaeresis
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In linguistics, a diaeresis, also spelled dieresis (from Greek διαίρεσις, διαιρεῖν diairein, to divide; see also American and British spelling differences) is the pronunciation of two adjacent vowels in two separate syllables rather than as a diphthong. An example is the first two vowels in the word "coöperate". The opposite phenomenon is known as synaeresis.
In orthography, the term "diaeresis" is sometimes used as a shortening of "diaeresis mark", which designates a diacritic similar to the umlaut sign ( ¨ ) that was originally placed over vowels to indicate that they had undergone a phonological diaeresis, but has since been repurposed for a variety of different functions, in various languages. See Diaeresis (diacritic).
Phonological diaeresis is sometimes indicated with other diacritics, such as the acute accent in Spanish and Portuguese. For example, the Portuguese words saia [ˈsai̯ɐ] "skirt" and saía [saˈiɐ] "I used to leave" (Brazilian pronunciation) differ in that the sequence /ai/ forms a diphthong in the former (synaeresis), but is a hiatus in the latter (diaeresis).