1008: Inconsistent Diacritics Sep 12, 2017

Even when the denotation of sound is standardized universally, as with the International Phonetic Association (IPA), all of the orthographical conventions are fundamentally arbitrary. While certainly more regular than English's spelling rules, there is, for example, no phonological reason that nasalized vowels in IPA are written with a tilde, such as with /õ/ as in the French 'bon' while the nasalized versions of the consonants /b/ and /d/ are written as /m/ and /n/ respectively. Therefore, it should be no surprise that anything used in the standard writing of one language would not  necessarily denote the same thing in another. In German orthography for instance, an umlaut indicates a different pronunciation of a vowel than without it, however in French orthography the umlaut, or 'accent tréma', is used to indicate that two vowels written next to each other are to be pronounced independently, like in 'naïve'. There are not any diacritical marks used in English orthography, but occasionally some practices are borrows from other languages; most often this appears in words adopted from other languages, like 'doppelgänger' from German or 'naïveté' from French. In fairly rare cases however, an umlaut will be placed over a vowel in order to accomplish the same effect as in French, such as in the variant spelling of 'reëmphasize'.