PaulB wrote:..e New Yorker article ..co-operation was spelled twice with an umlaut.
.. I guess I hoping that @kanga might see this post! 
What about the "little circle" above (often) letter A's in Scandi languages?
..
https://elms.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/l ... of-europe/
So how does Finnish end up so closely related to Hungarian?
flattered, I think
Certainly languages and language differences are a(nother) nerdish interest of mine, in a strictly amateur way. I have never been employed as a libguist, but never had a job (nor hobby, including aviation) where I have not used my languages.
I have known many very scholarly Americans; but have also often seen amusingly incompetent attempts at appearing scholarly by Americans who thereby demonstrate that they are not, including use of a diaeresis [sic, not an
umlaut] in 'coordination', a solecism which I had seen before. Of course, it is their language; but feq Americans seem to realise that it is actually different from the English (written and spoken) of the rest of the anglophone world (including nearby Canada).
Others have admirably answered on the questions of diacritics on vowels in the Nordic IE languages. Of course, one can also get them on vowels and consonants in other IE Latin-script languages, and in non-IE languages, and in IE languages in other scripts (which may then have their own variants: modern Russian Cyrillic is not the same character-set as modern Serbian Cyrillic), and in non-IE languages in other scripts (basic Arabic script, which has limited diacritics of various sorts, is enhanced by further and mutually different diacritics for Ottoman, Farsi, Urdu, ..).
On definte articles, mentioned by another Forumite: Latin did not have them, but Classical Greek did. Most modern Romance langages (derived from Latin) do, but Romanian does not. Romanian, like the 'distant cousin of Romance', related to classical Illyrian) Albanian, indicates definite nouns by postposition (changing noun endings). Also postpositive are Macedonian (probably the contemporary Slavonic closest to ancient forms) and Swedish among IE languages, and Hungarian among the Finno-Ugric (same may be true of Finnish/Estonian, not in my repertoire
). Other modern Slavonics have no definite article except for Bulgarian which does.
Hungarian is like the other Finno-Ugrics in both some vocabulary (showing cognateness) and in having agglutination and vowel harmony. Both the latter are also found in the Turkics, which are
not cognate to the Finno-Ugrics. The Turkic peoples all came from a migration which started in what is now approximately Kyrgyzstan; I believe that the Finno-Ugrics probably had a common analogous origin in North-Central Siberia.
There are of course limited numbers of ways of expressing ideas by juxtapositions or inflexions, so it is not surprising that wholly separate languages end up using the same quirks. The only genuine surviving West European isolate, Basque, has ergative verbs, in which the relations between the main other words in the sentence are shown only by endings of the (usually auxiliary) verb. The nearest other languages with ergatives are in the Caucasus, eg Georgian. And many North American indigenous languages have ergatives.
All great fun (for me) and probably desperately boring for most others. ..
[the languages my knowledge of which has most surprised visitors to JAM have probably been Hungarian, Basque and Maltese
]
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