'Lingua'ge--the Word on the 'Tongue'

       I miss the days in which the word "cooperate" appeared with an umlaut ( ̈) over the second "o"; you knew it was pronounced "co-operate," and not "cooper-ate."  Even using the hyphen is fine with me.  You can tell right away how to say it.

       Today, noticing "biopic" in print, I was aware of the problem again.  Could be pronounced like "myopic," but it isn't.  This word refers to a biographical motion picture and so is a BI-o-pic not a bi-AH-pic.   In this instance,  I'd prefer to see the hyphen, "bio-pic," for clarity.

       We knew at once that "naive" had two syllables and not one when the "i" had the umlaut over it, meaning, from the German, "the sound changes around."