Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Need advice from people who use non-ascii all day long

On Fri, Dec 04, 2009 at 10:17:30AM +0100, Patrick Holthaus wrote:

> You cannot simply leave the umlaut out since it is considered as a separate
> letter for itself. You cannot choose whether to write an "?" or an "o". Like
> Renat said, there are words that completely change their meaning when
> exchanging the characters.
>
> I think this is especially true if it comes to names. While people get used to
> spellings like "Goettingen" for G?ttingen, it looks odd and wrong to Germans.
> Like someone who doesn't have the character on the keyboard ;)
> Also keep in mind that there are cities that are spelled with "oe" or "ae" by
> design. (Soest, Oelde, Aerzen, Oestinghausen etc.) Those cannot be spelled
> with an "?" instead. It would simply be wrong.

OK, that settles it :-)

It seems the message you folks are trying to pound into my head is
that people don't just casually drop the umlauts and accents.  That's
what was bugging me -- if it is an extra key or weird combinations
like in emacs, maybe people would skip it often enough that we would
have to allow for that.

This is a better answer than I had feared because now I don't have to
sweat weird transliterations.  There may still be some, but probably
not enough to worry about.

Now on to other mysteries, like why our (American) customer thinks
people in French Guayana (sp?) are going to write "French Guayana" for
the country name.  Even my thick skull doesn't expect people living in
Deutschland (probably spelled wrong too, it is very late in a long and
tiring day, so apologies in advance, and if it is correct, apologies
for not recognizing that :-) to write "Germany" ...


Thanks for not pounding my head too heavily ...

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