Evolution of the digraph “ae” in the German language during the centuries

Question

^{I am German, but I thought I would ask this question in English so that everyone possessing knowledge about this specific subject could join in independently from the language it was asked in.}

In Latin, the digraph ae has been spoken in many different ways, but it has always been written as ae, that is, the pronunciation changed, but not the way it is written. At the end of the early Middle Ages, the phonetics had changed so much in, for example, Italian, that the diphthong lost its first letter, and became an e, even though in this specific case, some words retained the a until modern Italian became widespread, but I digress.

In German, specifically, and maybe in other Germanic languages I am unaware of, the diphthong did not fuse into one letter, but was retained through the ages; for example, in many writings of the 18^th century, you can still find spellings such as Aesthetik. But then why, at the end, did it mutate into first the famous aͤ (that is, an a with a small e above it) and later into today’s ä?

Answer 1

^{All images are hyperlinks to their sources.}

As with all historical typographic and linguistic developments, it’s much more easy to say what happened than why it happened. The following is a brief overview over the history, which I try to back up where I can:

• In medieval calligraphy and typsetting before movable type, it was quite common to use superscript letters for shorthands and abbreviatures. For example take a look at this or this (both from the 15^th century):

  

  In this setting, writing an a followed by or below a superscripted e is nothing special.

  On the other hand, the first document linked above already used two dots instead of a superscript e for the umlaut:

  

  I know no trustworthy theory about the origin of using two dots here (see also below).

• In movable type, the usage of superscript letters and similar described in the above was (mostly) discontinued. (I assume economic reasons – the fewer different glyphs you have, the better.) The lowercase umlauts ä, ö, and ü were the exception, and set in the aͤ form, i.e., with a small e above the letter:

  

  However, in early printed type, you also had other combinations, e.g.:

  

• In the 19^th century, modern-day lowercase umlauts slowly began to emerge in printed type:

  

  You find some claims on the Internet that this form originates from the e in Kurrent as follows:

  

  (The above reads ſchoen ſchoͤn ſchön.) The problem with this argument is that the classical umlauts can be found in handwriting much earlier (see the second example above) than the handwriting examples given to substantiate this argument. As I could not find any better evidence for this claim, I am very skeptical of it.

  My personal guess is that the small e was not recognisable as such in most printing anyway and for the sake of reading it did not matter whether it was an e, two dots or some squiggle. Thus, the easier alternative of using two dots became popular.

• Finally, at the end of the 19^th century, capital umlauts began to emerge and were made part of the official German orthography in 1901. Before, you almost only had the base letter followed by a regular e. Therefore you will find spellings like Aesthetik in writings earlier than this and you still have remnants of this in the spellings of proper names like Uelzen.

  In my recherches on blackletter typesetting, I found very few examples of a small e being used above an uppercase letter to indicate an uppercase umlaut, but unfortunately the only one I can find right now is from an old Norwegian text: