> Noël, aïoli, and naïve All three of those were borrowed from French, which uses the diaeresis, so this is "just" keeping the original French spelling. > I d

> Noël, aïoli, and naïve All three of those were borrowed from French, which uses the diaeresis, so this is "just" keeping the original French spelling. > I don't think you'd ever use a hyphen with zoological, but might (or might not) with re-elect. The hyphen only works with words where the vowels came together as a result of compounding (here, adding a prefix like re- or co- to the beginning of another word that already starts with a vowel). At least in Noël and naïve, the vowels came together because French lost a <t> that was present in Latin between two vowels -- interestingly in both cases here a word related to "birth" (natalis and nativus).