Talk:umlaute

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User:Doremítzwr claims that umlaut has a plural umlaute (i.e., like the German plural Umlaute). Is this an acceptable British way of pluralizing umlaut, or is it wishful thinking? In the U.S. I have never seen anything like that being done. —Stephen 11:13, 2 June 2009 (UTC)Reply

umlauts appears in BNC (1), COCA (5), and OED citations (4); whereas umlaute does not. Maybe we're looking at a potential justification for {{hyperforeign}}. DCDuring TALK 11:33, 2 June 2009 (UTC)Reply

• He seems to have cited it pretty thoroughly, and while some seem obviously to be treating the word as German, other do not. So...QED. I would tag it rare. Ƿidsiþ 11:39, 2 June 2009 (UTC)Reply

I'd emphasize seems. In the unhelpful quotation dump are at most three citations that do cite the headword (uncapitalized) without marking it with parentheses (as a gloss), or in italics or quotes (as a foreign word), to wit 1874, 1945, and 1998. (The capitalization of a German noun would also seem to mark it as foreign.) I don't think any of the other quotations belong in the entry, especially as it is not a lemma.

• The absence of use in the 3 controlled corpora and the 867 raw b.g.c. hits for umlauts would suggest the need to indicate low frequency with a {{rare}} or {{uncommon}}. DCDuring TALK 12:31, 2 June 2009 (UTC)Reply

OTOH, although the material should not reside at this entry, it illustrates the difficulties folks have with handling non-English words. In this case, the writers can be presumed knowledgeable. But they (or their typesetters) come to different conclusions about the right way of presenting a plural form of a non-English word to their readers. DCDuring TALK 16:03, 2 June 2009 (UTC)Reply

Most of these appear to be wholly unnaturalized usages, judging by italics, capitals, and the use of bold in one reference. At least a couple don't look like English usage to me at all.

We do need an unnaturalized or foreign usage label, indicating words that usually appear in italics for foreignness. —Michael Z. 2009-06-05 01:34 z

A number of the sources are linguistic sources. 1900 is interesting because, unusually, it is a non-German linguistic context. Perhaps this deserves to be labelled foreign, linguistics. —Michael Z. 2009-06-05 03:26 z

RFV passed, but tagged (rare), per Widsith and DCDuring. I've also removed it from the inflection line at ], putting it in a usage note instead. I didn't do the whole "unnaturalized"/"foreign"/"hyperforeign" thing, because I don't quite know how that's supposed to work, but anyone wanting to, please feel free. —Ruakh_TALK 02:56, 1 December 2009 (UTC)Reply