 The term umlaut, which goes back to Jacob Grimm, is used in two ways. On the one hand, it denotes a special kind of vocaliate change in many Germanic languages, whereby a vowel is pronounced more like a following vowel. For example, take the back vowel u and the front vowel i. Pronounced in succession, we get ui. Words in which these two vowels stand next to each other are easier to pronounce if the vowels are drawn closer together so that ui becomes u. A modern umlaut example is the German city name Duisburg. Historical examples can be found in some English plural forms, for example in Mais, which goes back to the West Germanic prototype Mussi, which changed to Muss by means of umlauting. In German, the term umlaut is also used for those characters in the German alphabet that denote sounds which resulted from historical umlauting operations, e as in menna, u as in flöse and u as in füse.