Graduation certificate at the end of my articled years, still in my 'umlaut'-ted name
Coming to Australia cost me only fifty quid. Becoming an Australian cost me an 'n' and an umlaut, from Görmann to Goerman. Having added an 'e' behind the 'o' preserved the 'ö'-umlaut (changed sound), at least to a German speaker.
A friend suggested that it would've been better had I turned myself into an English 'Gorman', maybe even into an Irish 'O'Gorman', but that would've turned me into an Irish joke with a thick German accent.
More than sixty years later, the thickness that once was in my accent has moved down to my waist, but occasionally I still speak the old mother tongue, which then makes me reflect on the evolution of the German umlaut, which is an interesting story in its own right.
German handwriting in lower and upper case 'Fraktur'
The two dots over German vowels (ä, ö, ü) didn't start as dots. They are the typographic ghosts of a tiny letter left behind by medieval scribes.
To understand it, one must also understand German 'Fraktur', a type of German handwriting which was still the official script during the Third Reich, which my parents used, and which I was still taught at school.
"Gesunde Eltern, gesunde Kinder" (Healthy parents, healthy children)
This Third Reich poster promotes the "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring" of July 14, 1933, by presenting an idealised, radiant, and healthy German family with four children. The law stipulated that individuals with hereditary diseases could be sterilised, even against their will; the text of the law explicitly permitted the use of "direct coercion" to this end. The only offspring desired were those considered "healthy" and of "pure stock" according to National Socialist ideology.
Before umlauts existed, ancient Germanic languages used a suffix containing an "i" or a "j" to make words plural or change a verb's tense. For example, the Old High German word for guest was Gast, and its plural was Gasti.
Saying "Gasti" requires your mouth to start open in the back for the "a," then snap to the front for the "i." Speakers naturally started anticipating the front vowel while still saying the back vowel. This phonetic shortcut pulled the "a" forward in the mouth, creating an intermediate "ä" sound. Gasti began sounding like gästi. Linguists call this process i-mutation, or i-umlaut.
Over hundreds of years, unstressed word endings weakened into a neutral "e" or disappeared entirely. Gästi became the modern German Gäste. With the ending altered, the vowel change was left doing all the grammatical lifting. The mutated vowel was no longer just a lazy pronunciation habit; it was the only thing distinguishing singular from plural (Maus vs. Mäuse, Apfel vs. Äpfel).
When writing down Middle High German, those early scribes needed a way to show that a vowel had been mutated. They started by adding an "e" after the affected vowel (ae, oe, ue). To save space on expensive parchment, they eventually began writing a microscopic "e" (in 'Fraktur', of course) directly above the a, o, and u (see centre of example below).
schoen - schoͤn - schön (the German word for 'nice')
This is a 'schönes' example of the typographic evolution of the umlaut from a small, superscript 'e' to the modern two dots.
In medieval German handwriting scripts like Fraktur, the lowercase "e" consisted of two short vertical strokes. As handwriting sped up and typefaces modernised, those two little vertical slashes eroded into two simple dots.
Because the dots are technically a superimposed "e," German crosswords and official documents still treat ä, ö, and ü as "ae," "oe," and "ue." If a German keyboard isn't available, typing the "e" next to the vowel remains the officially accepted substitute — reverting the spelling back to exactly how scribes wrote it a thousand years ago. So perhaps I didn't anglicise my name after all; I simply went back a thousand years.
But perhaps I shouldn't have bothered at all, because every time I walk into a restaurant these days, I am still recognised for who I really am!
Googlemap Riverbend
P.S. I have sent this blog to friends in Germany who are now too busy learning Arabic to bother about the evolution of their own language. As has been so often attributed to Muammar Gaddafi, "We don't need bullets, we just outbreed them"; mistakenly so, because it's actually a misattribution of a famous quote by former Algerian President Houari Boumediene, who stated at the UN in 1974 that victory would come from "the wombs of our women". There is an urban myth that one Muslim family in Germany has so many children that it has its own school bus. Maybe it's the same bus that stopped so its driver could carry out his Islamic prayers - click here. Well, at least HE is working!
