diaeresis

We had pretty much decided that this word is the proper name for what we might call the lazy colon, the two dots over a letter, whether its function is to indicate the change of a vowel sound due to influence by a following vowel, the process known as umlaut (cf. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umlaut), or to indicate that the vowel so marked is pronounced independently of the preceding vowel, as in naïve. But this site (http://www.csi.uottawa.ca/~kbarker/ling-devices.html) claims that diaeresis is the name of the latter process.

A) Whoda thunk?

and

2) Now what do we call the lazy colon?