Färm: rise of the eco-umlaut?
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From Alex Baumans:
Recently a supermarket of this ecofriendly chain opened in my neighborhood. As the initiative seems to be francophone, I suppose the name is a superposition of the French 'ferme' and English 'farm' by way of German spelling. What struck me most was their unbounded enthusiasm for putting little dots on vowels. I can't imagine how most of them are supposed to pronounced, so the dots clearly only serve a decorative purpose. Is the eco-umlaut the successor of the hard rock-umlaut, I wonder.
The (French) header of their web site:
The Dutch version:
A job posting on their site offers this perspective:
Färm, c’est un réseau coopératif de magasins bio qui propose de donner davantage de sens à notre alimentation. Par la vente de produits bio, locaux et éthiques, mais aussi en soutenant les producteurs indépendants et les entreprises familiales, et en évitant les multinationales cotées en bourse. En vous engageant dans la coopérative et en mettant vos talents au service de l’alimentation durable, vous participerez à faire changer les consciences.
Färm is a cooperative chain of organic stores that aims to give more meaning to our food. By selling organic, local, and ethical products, but also in supporting independent producers and family businesses, and by avoiding multinationals listed on the stock market. By joining the cooperative and applying your talents to sustainable food, you will participate in changing minds.
You probably will have guessed that this is a Belgian enterprise — the list of "mägasins" (or "wïnkels") confirms it.
I was struck by the fact that both the French and Dutch versions of the website use (an umlautified version of) the English word "NËWS" in their headers and in the title of the corresponding pages. They also use the English word "JOB" (without an umlaut) on the cited job-advertising page:
Note also the use of "écriture inclusive".
Michael Watts said,
July 17, 2020 @ 7:03 am
It appears to function differently from all of the examples in the earlier post. In those examples, the center dot is used to set off material that is present in the feminine form and absent in the masculine form — musicien / musicienne is written musicien·ne; représentés / représentées is written représenté·e·s.
But here it looks like the form conseiller·ère is meant to alternate between conseiller / conseillère, not between conseiller / conseillerère. The normal use of the center dot was to indicate material that is either present or absent; this doesn't work well when applied to material that is present — but different (e vs è) — in both genders.
[I've also seen things like "lecteur·rice".]
David Marjanović said,
July 17, 2020 @ 7:50 am
News is also common in German in this function – this particular function: menu headers on websites – because Neuigkeiten is too long for the available space and arguably too informal in meaning (news in media are called Nachrichten, but in this context that could be misunderstood as "messages").
Job is all over Europe now.
Twill said,
July 17, 2020 @ 8:11 am
@Michael Watts Clearly if the écriture inclusive inventors were at all systematic they would've used proper regex syntax, une? and conseill(er|ère).
Bloix said,
July 17, 2020 @ 9:01 am
The fake umlaut has been a thing in US marketing for some time – it implies Northern European design (Scandinavian) or quality (German). It's past its peak, though, perhaps in part because you can't use it in your url or hashtag, creating an inconsistency in naming (the product is Dreädful but the hashtag is #dreadful). You can see this problem at the HÄAGEN-DAZS® site, https://www.haagendazs.us and #haagendazs
Robert Coren said,
July 17, 2020 @ 10:17 am
I suppose this is something of a peeve, but this is Language Log, after all: Shouldn't the term umlaut be reserved for legitimate use of the dieresis in German?
Laura Morland said,
July 17, 2020 @ 10:19 am
I live in the other major francophone country in Europe, and "Färm" has yet to implant itself here.
I'm writing simply to comment on the "Scandinavian design" aspect of the name. Beyond Häagen-Dazs (which is very popular here; the milk comes from French cows, various flavors of the ice cream are readily available in supermarkets, and 20 years ago there was even a Häagen-Dazs shop at the Place de la Contrescarpe), the major name in 'alimentation bio' for nearly 30 years has been the brand BJORG.
As they state here,
Oui, nous sommes français et même lyonnais. Malgré la consonnance de notre nom, c’est en France, à Saint Genis-Laval (69) qu'une nutritionniste … a créé la marque Bjorg en 1988, avec la volonté de permettre au plus grand nombre d’accéder à une alimentation biologique, mais aussi saine, équilibrée et de qualité nutritionnelle.
https://www.bjorg.fr/notre-histoire.html
(Side note: all their products are delicious!)
Q. Pheevr said,
July 17, 2020 @ 11:53 am
We have lots of färms and färmers here in Nova Scotia.
(see pp. 221–2 of The Atlas of North American English)
Alexander Browne said,
July 17, 2020 @ 12:28 pm
@David Marjanović
Just curious: how is the j in "job" pronounced when the word is used in German?
I would guess that in French it gets the French j rather than dj like English, but maybe not?
Geoff M. said,
July 17, 2020 @ 12:29 pm
The diaeresis in "cöop", of course, actually makes sense!
David said,
July 17, 2020 @ 2:12 pm
In German, probably something that sounds like a cross between "job" and "chop" to English ears, because of initial devoicing and final obstruent devoicing in High German. I've been asked for my "patch" many a time when entering office buildings, before realizing I'm being asked for my badge.
The diaeresis (usually called tréma in French) is functionally different from an umlaut. See here.
S. Valkemirer said,
July 17, 2020 @ 3:02 pm
"I would guess that in French it gets the French j rather than dj like English, but maybe not?"
The French word has the voiced affricate, not the voiced fricative.
Ed M said,
July 17, 2020 @ 4:19 pm
I hear the people in the video saying "farm" as in English.
Michael Watts said,
July 17, 2020 @ 9:56 pm
It would make sense as an umlaut, but wouldn't a diaeresis go on the second vowel? ("coöp")
phanmo said,
July 18, 2020 @ 3:06 am
And if you're not going to use "diaeresis", shouldn't you at least use "tréma" , which is the correct name in French, and seems to be the same word in Dutch?
Jarek Weckwerth said,
July 18, 2020 @ 6:25 am
@Alexader Brown: "Just curious: how is the j in "job" pronounced when the word is used in German?"
The Deutsches Aussprachewörterbuch from De Gruyter has
Job (Tätigkeit) engl. dʒɔp
which phonetically is exactly what David said, since the dʒ is going to be devoiced. I can distinctly remember saying this word in a German lesson as [jo:p], baffling my teacher 110%.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
July 18, 2020 @ 6:27 am
@ Q. Pheevr: "We have lots of färms and färmers here in Nova Scotia. "
This is cool! Can I use it in a course I teach please?
David Marjanović said,
July 18, 2020 @ 7:01 am
If you really want to go there, it should be reserved for the historical phonological process that copied features from vowels in later syllables onto vowels in earlier syllables…
Basically as the other David said. People try to get as close to [dʒ] as they can, which usually is just [tʃ].
The o is equated with the native /ɔ/. However, it is lengthened in the south, where syllable-final fortition doesn't exist (so the b comes out as [b̥] but not [p]). In the north and center, syllable-final fortition automatically turns the b into a loudly released [p], complete with pre-fortis clipping.
No. [dʒ] is pretty common in French nowadays because de so often loses its vowel: marteau de géologue > marteau d'géol' "rock hammer".
Jonathan Badger said,
July 18, 2020 @ 7:37 am
I wonder if it has any connection to the decorative umlauts/dieresises that used to be popular in band names — "Blue Öyster Cult", "Mötley Crüe", etc.
Coby Lubliner said,
July 18, 2020 @ 4:37 pm
Except that in French [dʒ] is actually pronounced as a stop-fricative sequence rather than a true affricate. The same is true of other affricate borrowings, such as pizza, tsar or tchèque. This is the reason why the IPA, being a French invention, never developed proper characters for affricates.
Yuval said,
July 18, 2020 @ 6:38 pm
The Metal umlaut is a possible inspiration, but I think chances are higher that this is an Ikea-influenced style choice?
Chester Draws said,
July 18, 2020 @ 10:46 pm
Perhaps you they want to be called farm but have search engines find them first time. (As a person with a first and last name that are very common English words I know that I disappear from searches.)
Searching färm does bring them up immediately.
David Marjanović said,
July 19, 2020 @ 6:25 am
No, the plosive is not released before the fricative starts. Phonetically, this thing is an affricate.
Pronunciation aside, however, the language treats all phonetic affricates as stop-fricative sequences.
Combined with the fact that the International "Phonetic" Alphabet is mainly concerned with representing phonemic distinctions, this may be one of the reasons why the IPA doesn't use individual glyphs for affricates. But another reason seems to be the fact that there simply are more affricates than it would be practical to invent glyphs for. Make one step out of Europe, and you get languages with /t͡ɬ/, /q͡χ/ and the like, not to mention good old /k͡x/ within Europe.
On top of that, not all affricates, phonetic or even phonemic, have a single place of articulation. High German's good old /p͡f/ really releases a bilabial closure into a labiodental fricative. In Polish, cz (as in czy "or") is a straighforward [ʈ͡ʂ] (not very retroflex actually), and while some native speakers pronounce trz (as in trzy "3") as just a lengthened version of that, i.e. [ʈ͡ʂː], others says [t͡ʂ], starting out laminal and then going retroflex. (If you do that too slowly, you end up with [t͡sʂ].) Even so, they do not release the stop and then start the fricative.
Andrew Usher said,
July 19, 2020 @ 8:22 am
On top of that, I simply do not think any contrast between affricates and stop-fricative sequences could be stable. What we call an 'affricate' is really just the result of the natual process of fusion of an adjacent stop and fricative that are similar enough – 'tr' is an affricate in English, but not in other European languages, because /t/ and /r/ are similar enough in English to 'run together'.
On the original topic it's obvious that the 'umlauts' (or whatever you want to call the diacritic) mean nothing; indeed the speakers pronounce 'farm' just as you'd expect with French, ignoring it. I could not say why they made this decision, but it looks dumb to me.
I'd guess that there simply are no official rules for 'ecriture inclusive' and ad-hoc solutions are going to be seen, none having any self-evident pronunciation. To an English speaker the insistence on marking gender seems perverse; especially as in German where it's not a matter of grammatical endings but of sticking an obtrusive suffix/infix in all the female equivalents. I trust that everyone here know that this doesn't in itself make English speakers blind to gender any more than speakers of more gendered languages; we just don't _need_ to specify it all the time.
k_over_hbarc at yahoo.com
Rodger C said,
July 19, 2020 @ 10:04 am
the IPA, being a French invention
I thought it was invented by the English, originally to teach English to the French. This might have the same result.
Joke Kalisvaart said,
July 19, 2020 @ 2:41 pm
Many products in The Netherlands have both Dutch and French text, probably because they also want to be able to sell it in Belgium.
But if there is little space, they often use English as a kind of compromise. For example the word 'NEW' in big letters, instead of nieuw/nouveau.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
July 19, 2020 @ 6:56 pm
@David Marjanović: Even so, they do not release the stop and then start the fricative.
The careful pronunciation very certainly can involve a released /t/ followed by the fricative that I'm not going to transcribe because I don't want to take sides on its putative retroflexion ;)
An important point in Polish is that in "standard" pronunciation the affricate is phonemically distinct from a plosive + fricative sequence, as in czy vs. trzy. (Some dialects lack this distinction.)
And WRT single glyphs for affricates: the IPA absolutely did have them as an option for at least ʧ and ʤ, and Unicode has them, as you can see ;)
~flow said,
July 20, 2020 @ 8:27 am
Based on my impression of the audio samples in the English Wikipedia article about Polish Phonology I'd rather transliterate the initial sound of trzy as [ʈ͡ːʂ], i.e. with the stop being lengthened, not the sibilant. At least that's the distinction I was able to make out.
Frans said,
July 25, 2020 @ 8:59 am
Job has been Belgian or at least Belgian Dutch for many decades. Not unlike news the only thing noteworthy about it in a Belgian context is the decorative diaereses.