It's different because in English, a diacritic of two dots (diaeresis) is used to show that a vowel is pronounced separately from the vowel that came before it, not as a mix. Naïve is one example, where it is pronounced na-ive, not nive. That said, I also like it, but it means something different here.
> in English, a diacritic of two dots (diaeresis) is used to show that a vowel is pronounced separately from the vowel that came before it, not as a mix.
You've correctly defined diaeresis, but it's not actually used in English except in articles that get published in The New Yorker. There is a reason the common English name for the diacritic is "umlaut".
The normal use in English is to show that a word comes from German. There are some old relics like naïve (commonly spelled naive, now) and Laocoön (again, now usually spelled Laocoon). To the best of my knowledge a diaeresis has never been applied to the name "Menelaus" even though it "needs" one just as badly as Laocoon does.
> Naïve is one example, where it is pronounced na-ive, not nive.
The diaeresis there really just shows you that the word is borrowed from French, where it has a diaeresis for internal French reasons. (Because, again, English spelling does not include the concept of diaeresis.) It certainly doesn't tell you not to pronounce the word as "nive" (I assume you're referring to the PRICE vowel) -- the ordinary reading of the written vowel sequence "ai" would use the FACE vowel, as in plain, main, strain, vain, tail, wail, pail, sail, mail, plaice, taint, and waive.
Note that the Russian letter Ё does not feature a diacritic - the two dots are an integral part of the letter, and it is not related to the visually similar Russian letter E. As noted upthread, it is the iotified form of the letter O. (Russian has five or six non-reduced vowels, but for historical reasons the Russian alphabet has eleven vowels, including a / e / i / o / u plus ya / ye / y / yo / yu.)
It absolutely is used in English, although not commonly, and it was more common in older texts. Nowadays it’s mostly used in proper nouns like Zoë, Chloë, and in some spellings of my own name, Coën.
> The normal use in English is to show that a word comes from German.
I can't think of any such examples similar to "naïve". Stuff like "ü" shows up in German names - and that's because the modern English convention is to not transliterate names that are already spelled in some kind of Latin script, even if it means dealing with weird digraphs, diacritics, or letters like ð. This doesn't work for Cyrillic, though.
Sorry mate, but an umlaut does not represent the same thing as a diaeresis! I don't know what you're arguing for other than that the diaeresis is archaic, which does not conflict with what I said at all. My argument was that the ë used in Russian is different from the ë used in English (and French) because they represent different things, which is exactly what you said too.
A diaeresis mark is not used in English. You claimed that it was. That's what I'm saying. There is no ë used in English.
> Sorry mate, but an umlaut does not represent the same thing as a diaeresis!
You're going to need to decide what you're talking about. The diacritic of two dots positioned above a letter is most often called "umlaut" in English. It is not normally called "diaeresis", but sometimes it is.
There is a phonological phenomenon also called "umlaut", which is related to the name for the mark in that the mark was historically used in German to indicate the phenomenon. The relationship is dead now; German ö is just a different letter from German o.
In older texts the notation appears on other words like coöperation. Some Americans use dieresis in their names as well (Zoë and Chloë are increasingly common for example). Furthermore the dieresis (trema in French) in naïf is doing the same job as a dieresis in English, so it can be easy to make the claim that we got all dieresis from French, but in reality it seems to have been borrowed from Ancient Greek as late as the 1600s, and gone directly from Ancient Greek texts to the languages that use the notation today (Galician, English, French, Occitan, Dutch)
