Khaki F. Dog

In the linked-to article on the New Yorker, Richard Socarides uses the spelling “reëlection”. This is the first time I’ve seen the diaeresis, the two points over the e, used in this fashion.

Germans call it Umlaut, but use it primarily to modify the sound of vowels. In Dutch we call it a ‘trema’ and use it exclusively to separate two adjoining monopthong vowels, preventing them from being parsed as a dipthong.

Concretely, that means exactly what’s happening here: the diaeresis over the second e notifies the reader that the word is re/e/lec/tion, not reel/ec/tion.

Since Dutch borrows the German habit of combining related words, we need this diacritic pretty badly, though it’s not such a huge problem since the late-’90s spelling reform.

A classic example is the word ‘reeëëer’, a bizarre word even by Dutch standards. A ‘ree’ is a deer, ‘eer’ is honor, and they’re joined by another e to make the word flow. “Honor of deer / a deer”. The result is that the connecting e needs a trema to separate it, and the first e in ‘eer’ also needs separating. The spelling reform chilled it out somewhat and now it’s ’ reeëneer’, which is obviously miles better.

Anyway: I’ve never seen this diacritic used like this in English. 

Socarides, who penned the author, was an adviser to Clinton, so I can only assume he enjoyed a robust education.

So, to my American friends, the question: what’s up with this? Is this use of the diaeresis old-fashioned, or restricted to certain educational institutions?