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I know that diaeresis is used to show that two adjacent vowels are not a diphthong but should be pronounced separately, as in naïve or Zoë. Is there an equivalent mark or format in current or historical use that shows that a pair of consonants that usually form a digraph (e.g. "sh" or "th") should be read separately?

Cases where a word is is made up of identifiable parts are easy to deal with. One can do nothing and rely on the reader's understanding of the separate morphemes (e.g. knighthood) or with true compounds one can put in a hyphen, e.g. pot-hook.

However there is more of a problem when transcribing a word or personal name that comes from an unfamiliar foreign language (so the reader is unlikely to know its spelling conventions), is not a compound, and yet contains a syllable ending with "s" or "t" immediately followed by a syllable beginning with "h", or or another easily misread combination.

Right now I can't think of any words either from English or a from a foreign language which present this problem, but among all the vast multitude of proper names and languages in the world that sometimes need to be written in English it must sometimes occur. It also would come up in transcribing fictional constructed languages so as to sound "alien" yet still be easily readable. In fact my question here was inspired by this question on Writers' Stack Exchange , in which it was asked how to represent words from a fictional language that would be likely to be mispronounced in English.

Inserting a hyphen into a word that is a single unit of meaning seems wrong. Inserting an apostrophe might be better, but an apostrophe suggests either a glottal stop or the marking of omitted letters, neither of which might be present. I seem to recall once seeing a full stop placed between letters to show this but that might have been a quirk of an individual writer. Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet, explanations in brackets, or asterisks all disrupt the flow of reading.

Is there an existing convention or a better solution?

Added later: Some real life examples of words whose pronunciation would be clearer with a consonantal diaeresis: - posthumous - shorthand - Mathias (German proper name) - Kuthumi (name of a nineteenth century Indian mystic) - methemoglobin / methaemoglobin / methæmoglobin (medical term, in which the prefix "met" means "change in") - Ishak (Arabic proper name). In practice with the exception of the occasional hyphen these words seem to have no orthographic device to mark the correct pronunciation, thus answering my question in the negative, unless there are counter-examples I haven't yet met.

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Lostinfrance
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  • At first sight your final paragraph seems to exclude all possibilities! Please can you show an example of a text (perhaps with 'knighthood' ) with some indication of how you would mark it with this word without a comment in brackets. – chasly - supports Monica Sep 01 '15 at 11:22
  • Giving the IPA rendering of a word that few English readers will have encountered is surely wise? Transcriptions are often not easy. And 'words from fictional languages' are, per se, off-topic here. Tolkien provided a complete language guide along with his inventions. – Edwin Ashworth Sep 01 '15 at 11:22
  • @chaslyfromUK, alas, I don't know of any such marking. I was hoping that one exists of which I was ignorant, or perhaps a style that has fallen into disuse that I could revive. – Lostinfrance Sep 01 '15 at 11:29
  • @EdwinAshworth, I mentioned the question about constructed languages mostly to give credit to the person who got me interested in this issue. As I said, it surely must come up in real life sometimes. Also, I think the topic of English usage can reasonably include questions about whether there is a standard English usage to deal with a potential problem. In practice I'd probably use the IPA or an imitated pronunciation in brackets, but I'm just interested to know if there is a "smoother" way. – Lostinfrance Sep 01 '15 at 11:39
  • I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it doesn't fall within the purview of this site. – aparente001 Sep 02 '15 at 20:43
  • @aparente001, I really don't see that it's significantly different from well-regarded questions like this one http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/124069/usage-of-macrons-in-latin-loanwords , or this one http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/224432/why-does-english-omit-diacritics-on-foreign-names both of which deal with how or whether to use a diacritic to indicate a foreign pronounciation in English. A search shows that there are also many questions of the form "is there an equivalent of X?" on the site. – Lostinfrance Sep 02 '15 at 21:25
  • I was convinced by the comment by @EdwinAshforth. But I'm just one vote. Edwin himself didn't even vote to close. And you already got some contributions in an answer and several comments! – aparente001 Sep 02 '15 at 21:28
  • But in "Mathias" the "th" is a unitary digraph representing /t/ (like in "Neanderthal" or "Thomas"); it's also a digraph in "Kuthumi." So it seems wrong to me to separate the "h." In "methemoglobin" by contrast the "t" and "h" do seem to be pronounced separately, although there would be precedent for pronouncing them as a digraph: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/237896/is-there-any-english-word-in-which-ph-is-not-pronounced-as-f/237908#comment513361_237908 – herisson Sep 02 '15 at 22:44
  • @sumelic, I'll take your word for it for Mathias (the term "unitary digraph" is new to me), but Kuthumi is often spelled Koot-hoomi or Koot Hoomi, seeming to indicate that it isn't a digraph. Ishak is a variant of Isaac, a name with variants in many languages. Some of them take one route, some the other: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_(name) – Lostinfrance Sep 02 '15 at 23:11
  • @Lostinfrance: whoops, I actually don't know what's up with "Kuthumi." I assumed it was like a normal Indian language name, but it seems it may be different. "Unitary digraph" was just my poor way of trying to express that the "t" and "h" in "Mathias" are not pronounced separately, but together. – herisson Sep 02 '15 at 23:40
  • @sumelic, BTW, thanks for that link. I clean forgot about "ph"! For anyone interested, the answers shown in that link give dozens of examples of words containing "ph" where the p and the h are separate sounds. I demand consonant diaeresis now! – Lostinfrance Sep 02 '15 at 23:41
  • If a compound word has come to be recognized in common use without a hyphen, there is no need for a hyphen. One of the "grammatically-approved" uses of a hyphen, however, is to separate words, prefixes, or suffixes which would otherwise create ambiguity or difficulty. If a proper name has a letter sequence that would likely be mispronounced (e.g. a hypothetical doughamster website), a simple note "pronounced doug-hamster" could avoid such problems. – supercat Mar 14 '17 at 22:45
  • Breton uses an apostrophe to distinguish between /ʃ/, written ch, and /x/, written c’h. Catalan uses an interpunct (or, if unavailable, a period or a hyphen) to distinguish between /ʎ/, written ll, and /ɫː/, written /l·l/. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jan 04 '19 at 07:53

3 Answers3

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No, there is no special dieresis mark for consonants.

In your question, it seems to me that you have already excluded all of the most likely ways of marking that a sequence of "consonant letters" is not a digraph. I would recommend reconsidering your rejection of them (or just not worrying about ambiguity), because I don't know of any better or more established conventions.

Hyphens are not just used in compound words. They are also used to split words across line breaks. And English speakers may be familiar with the use of hyphens as syllable-boundary markers in special contexts, such as dictionary pronunciation guides.

The apostrophe would likely only suggest "a glottal stop" to linguistically sophisticated readers. I think most English speakers don't even know what a glottal stop is, let alone that there could be a contrast between a CC sequence and a CʔC sequence. So in practice, I doubt there is much risk of speakers pronouncing unintended glottal stops here. It's true that the apostrophe may suggest omitted letters.

The full stop (period) is the symbol used in the IPA to mark syllable boundaries. This is a specialist convention that the average English speaker would not find familiar, although the role of the period as a separator at the sentence level might make its use as a syllable divider somewhat intuitive.

Using a transcription or explanation might take up more space, but it's the only way to clearly convey this kind of information about the pronunciation of a word or phrase.

Discussion of specific examples.

The "h" in posthumous is non-etymological, and not normally pronounced at all. This is not a situation where a dieresis would be appropriate. If you are concerned about the possibility of it being pronounced with /θ/, you could use the spelling postumous; this is archaic and would be eccentric today, but I think no more eccentric than spellings that resort to diacritics (like "posthḧumous", "postḥumous" or "postḫumous").

Shorthand is a compound of "short" and "hand", so your objection to the use of the hyphen doesn't seem to apply here. The Oxford English Dictionary indicates that hyphenated spellings were used in the past.

Mathias is an example of the digraph "th" (used in Latin as an equivalent to the Greek letter θ). Since "θ" is a single letter (representing a single Greek phoneme), and the name is pronounced in German and in English with the single phoneme /t/ (not a sequence /t.h/), I can't see how a dieresis would be appropriate here.

Kuthumi seems to have often been spelled "Koot Hoomi", with a space, in the past. If you think it is necessary to use a spelling that more clearly conveys the pronunciation of this name, you could switch to using this one. The Wikipedia article on him even indicates that the spelling "Koot Hoomi" is used in the signatures of "K.H.'s early letters to Sinnett".

Methemoglobin doesn't really need a dieresis. When "t" and "h" were brought together in Ancient Greek, they combined to form the sound "th" (θ), as in cathode < Greek kathodos (κάθοδος) < kata- + hodos. The OED records both pronunciations with /t.h/ and pronunciations with /θ/ for methemoglobin. While analogy with hemoglobin and awareness of the presence of the met(a)- prefix probably will cause most English speakers to naturally pronounce /t.h/ in this word, it shouldn't be seen as an error to use /θ/.

Ishak is an Arabic name, so English speakers who don't know Arabic will mispronounce it no matter what you do, and English speakers who do know Arabic will probably know how to pronounce the "ambiguous" sh based on familiarity with the name. If despite this, you do want to give an accurate indication of the pronunciation, it would be essential to use some widely accepted system for transcribing Arabic; in the ALA-LC scheme, the name would be written Isḥāq. If you use the number-based transcription of Arabic consonants that is often seen on the Internet, you could write the middle consonant cluster as "s7". Although English speakers won't know how to pronounce the 7, at least they will probably know that they don't know how to pronounce the 7, as opposed to not knowing that they don't know how to pronounced the "sh" in "Ishak".

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herisson
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    The Arabic name is also one case where an apostrophe would make some sense. If a lack of knowledge of Arabic is presumed, a lack of knowledge of Arabic transcription schemes may also be presumed. If you just want an easy way to make the Anglicised spelling Ishak less ambiguous, you could go for Is’hak, which most readers would presumably recognise as a foreignish name with an apostrophe they don’t know what means – but not a name with the sound /ʃ/ in it. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jan 04 '19 at 10:49
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Distinguishing between unionized (being in a union) and unïonized (not being ionized) is an example where a consonant/vowel diaeresis mark seems to be genuinely useful. I can't think of a non-contrived consonant/consonant equivalent though.

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    From personal experience, I know that haphazard is not necessarily etymologically obvious if you first encounter it in writing. As a child, I long thought it was pronounced /ˈhafəzərd/, and I think I was a teenager before I realised that it was actually the spelling of the word I knew from spoken language as /hapˈhazərd/. It’s not a minimal pair, but it is a case where actual ambiguity and error can be introduced. Anthony (variously pronounced /ˈantəni/ and /ˈanθəni/) is another example of actual ambiguity. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jan 04 '19 at 10:52
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Maybe you are asking for a diacritic.

How about this for example?

knightḧood

Other symbols that may be useful:

ḥ

ḫ

You can find their specifications at http://graphemica.com

If you are writing a scholarly article, all you have to do is define what it means before the main text.

Definition of diacritic in English: noun

A sign, such as an accent or cedilla, which when written above or below a letter indicates a difference in pronunciation from the same letter when unmarked or differently marked.

Oxford Dictionaries

chasly - supports Monica
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    Just out of interest, is this your own invention or something you have seen used elsewhere? – Lostinfrance Sep 01 '15 at 11:33
  • What, you mean the umlaut over the h? It is a diacritic but I haven't seen it used in English. Whether it has been I don't know. Probably not! That is why I suggested giving a definition before using it. – chasly - supports Monica Sep 01 '15 at 11:49
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    Do you have a link that shows how to write this in html? – Lostinfrance Sep 01 '15 at 11:54
  • Does this help? ---> http://graphemica.com/%E1%B8%A7 – chasly - supports Monica Sep 01 '15 at 11:55
  • Thank you! You may just have secured your place in history. – Lostinfrance Sep 01 '15 at 11:59
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    As Wikipedia says, the "h" in English "sh" and "th" are already "in-line diacritics" anyway, because they modify the sound of the letter preceding them. So antḧill, for example, would imply change /t/* to a dental fricative, then change that to something else. Since the dental fricative could be either voiced /ð/* (as in *this) or unvoiced /θ/* (as in *thing) it could get a bit tricky deciding which* change was intended. A typographically simpler approach might be to just use a capital letter - *antHill*. – FumbleFingers Sep 01 '15 at 12:04
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    @Lostinfrance - I'm sure you have noticed but in that page I linked to, you can scroll sideways to find other such symbols. I've added a couple to the answer.Some are less intrusive then the umlaut. – chasly - supports Monica Sep 01 '15 at 12:34
  • What has this to do with English usage? At the very least, it should be closed as POB on ELU, and perhaps asked on an OF (orthography fiction) site. – Edwin Ashworth Sep 01 '15 at 18:42
  • I downvoted because "ḥ" and "ḫ" are generally already used for other things in transcriptions, so it would be confusing to use them for this new purpose. – herisson Sep 02 '15 at 22:46
  • For example, in transcription of the Arabic name ’Isḥāq, the only diacritic that can be used on the h is ḥ; ’Isḫāq would actually represent a different set of sounds. – herisson Sep 02 '15 at 23:43
  • @sumelic - downvote away. That's why I made it quite clear that you have to define your terms and abbreviations. This is an English stack exchange not an Arabic one. Therefore I can safely assume a lack of Arabic. If Arabic is involved then I offered a choice of symbols. I didn't claim any one of them was used canonically by anyone else. Note also that my main answer was diacritic and that was the main thrust of the question. Are you disputing that as well? – chasly - supports Monica Sep 02 '15 at 23:52
  • I certainly agree that if one uses these marks for this purpose, it's best to explicitly define them. I don't think it's a good idea to use these diacritics like this in the first place. I brought up the Arabic name because the OP refers to it in the question. – herisson Sep 02 '15 at 23:56
  • @sumelic - I can't help it if people add to their questions after I've answered. It's your right to down-vote and I'm not disputing it. I'd prefer a valid reason but I can't force you to give one. – chasly - supports Monica Sep 02 '15 at 23:59
  • "Diacritic" answers one interpretation of the question's title; I don't think it does a particularly good job of answering the actual question, which as I understand it, is asking for a practical rather than a theoretical answer: does any such specific diacritic actually exist? (I think the answer is "no.") If someone changes their question, you also have the ability to change your answer. – herisson Sep 03 '15 at 00:01
  • (1) Diacritic answers one interpretation Correct, it's my interpretation (2) I don't think it does a good job - Fine, I can't argue with that. (3) it is asking for a practical answer I offered a practical solution. I didn't say it was the only answer (4) Does any such diacritic actually exist - Yes, as soon as an author uses it that way,. How do you think all these things came to exist in the first place? (5) You have the ability to change your answer - Of course, however I have made hundreds of answers and I don't propose to review them all regularly. No more to say really. – chasly - supports Monica Sep 03 '15 at 00:31
  • @Fumble That logic doesn’t really work. You can argue that the h in the English consonant digraphs acts as an inline diacritic, but the diacritic over the h then has the specific function of letting the reader know that this is not meant to be read as a diacritic, but as an h. In other words, ⟨h⟩ may function as a diacritic, but ⟨ḧ⟩ does not – it functions only as a letter. You could argue that the i in ai is also an inline diacritic, and the diaeresis has the same function there: show that this is the letter i, not the diacritic i. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jan 04 '19 at 10:45